If anything could have tipped me off about her insecurities, it would have been “Cyber Stockholm Syndrome,” the closing track on the eponymously-titled mini-album that she released independently last November. A swirling soup of bright Britney-style pop glitter, “Cyber” tells the story of girl at a party who is unable to abandon the captivating blue light of her cell phone. It’s the perfect ending for a project that delves deep into the relationships we have with technology — a subject that Rina, who is still unsigned, was initially unsure of how to tackle. Ultimately, she approached the idea as she would a dissertation. “I read loads of studies about it,” she remembers. “I went through loads of news stories and I read like five or six books about technology and people. [When] I had enough material in my head, I made it into a story."

That story is about the ups and downs of tech-overload. “It’s a journey about how the internet makes me feel and how it relates to joy in a different way,” she explains of RINA. “And then, at the end, just being OK with the fact that things are always going to be a little bit shit.” It’s all set against a millennium-era pop backdrop, a sound that she and her producer Clarence Clarity selected for its inoffensive, joyful, and historically apolitical qualities.

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Pop music had already followed Rina throughout her childhood, first in Niigata, Japan, where she was born, and then in London, where she and her parents moved when she was five. In the earlier years, when Rina’s parents sent her to Japanese school to ensure she didn’t lose her heritage or language skills, she listened to Japanese artists like Utada Hikaru and the girl group Morning Musume. When she transitioned into the British school system, she fell in love with turn-of-the-century big-hitters like Britney and X-tina and Avril and P!nk. She says she found these women’s love songs to be spiritually elevating. “It was very heteronormative, but I think the overall end product was always joy.”