Intro Bonito

Kero Kero Bonito was formed in London in 2011 when producers Gus Lobban and Jamie Bulled recruited vocalist Sarah Midori Perry through an online forum for Japanese expatriates living in the UK. Perry had a background in fine arts and spoke both English and Japanese fluently. The music they made together was constructed largely around a Casio SA-46 mini keyboard, a plastic toy-grade instrument that costs less than a dinner out. Intro Bonito, self-released on SoundCloud and Bandcamp in September 2013, sounds exactly like that origin story: small, bright, and somehow bigger than it has any right to be.^[1]

The album's brevity and cheapness are not accidents. Across fifteen tracks in just over thirty minutes, Kero Kero Bonito built something that would take years for critics to fully account for. What seemed at first like a playful curiosity from an unlikely corner of the London underground turned out to be a founding document for a way of making pop music that would later influence an entire genre.

Making Small Things Strange

The most immediate quality of Intro Bonito is its register. The melodies are simple, the production deliberately airy and thin, the tone of the songs more playground than stage. This could read as a limitation. It is, instead, a philosophical position.

The Guardian's Paul Lester described the songs as "concise, pop-haiku-like explorations of the strangeness of babies, ecological issues or societal expectations of women" delivered through "playground-style melodies."^[1] The phrase "pop-haiku" is apt: a haiku creates a condition without explaining it, leaving the emotional weight to land indirectly. These songs approach serious subjects (reproductive pressure, environmental anxiety, the compulsory nature of work) by way of imagery so unguarded that the critique registers before the listener has time to resist it.

One track treats the experience of defeating someone at a video game with the same dancehall energy and conviction usually reserved for declarations of love. Another frames a child's instinct to refuse adult participation as a complete and reasonable response to the world. The playfulness is not naivety. It is strategy.

Two Languages, One Voice

Perry grew up in Nagoya and Otaru in Japan before moving to England at thirteen.^[2] That biographical fact is not incidental to the album's identity. Intro Bonito carries both languages throughout its tracklist, and in the case of one song, presents English and Japanese versions back to back, each running under a minute.

The bilingual structure is not merely aesthetic. The English and Japanese sections of songs carry distinct emotional registers, with the Japanese passages often bearing the sharper social commentary. This rewards listeners who can follow both, but it does not exclude those who cannot: the sonic difference between the two registers is itself meaningful, a texture of alternating familiarity and slight displacement.

By 2013, J-pop had achieved significant global visibility, partly through Kyary Pamyu Pamyu's viral spread and the influence of producer Yasutaka Nakata's maximalist synth-pop aesthetic.^[2] Western acts borrowing from J-pop were beginning to appear. What set Kero Kero Bonito apart was that the Japanese content in their music was not borrowed. It was lived.

Playground Idioms, Adult Questions

The album's thematic range is wider than its surface suggests. Alongside tracks about schoolwork, parks, and crocodiles kept in pockets, Intro Bonito engages with consumer culture, domestic expectation, and ecological anxiety, all filtered through the same compressed, childlike idiom.

A song about babies, framed with the wide-eyed tone of a children's book, interrogates the social pressure on women to reproduce without spelling it out. A song about going to a forest carries genuine feeling for natural spaces that would later become more explicit in the band's environmental work. The subjects are not trivial. They are treated with serious attention dressed in playful clothes.

Sputnikmusic's review of the album praised its "wider range of topics" and "more Nintendo-oriented sound" compared to the band's later work.^[3] The "Nintendo-oriented" descriptor points at something real: the album borrows from the chiptune tradition and from the way early video game soundtracks created emotional texture with minimal resources. It is an album that knows what it sounds like and chooses it anyway.

A Scene Adjacent to PC Music

Intro Bonito arrived in the same months that PC Music was being founded in London. The label, launched in June 2013, would be named "Label of the Year" by Fact magazine by the end of 2014, its hyper-stylized take on pop aesthetics briefly dominating music criticism's attention.^[4] Kero Kero Bonito were adjacent to this world (Danny L Harle and a PC Music alias both contributed remixes to the band's Bonito Recycling EP in 2014) but were never formally on the label.

The shared DNA was real: an enthusiasm for J-pop idioms, processed vocals, and an earnestness pushed to a pitch where it reads as radical rather than naive. The word "hyperpop" was not yet in circulation. Spotify would not popularize the genre tag until around 2019, and the records that would come to define it were still years away.^[5] But looking back, Intro Bonito reads as one of the earliest and clearest precursors to that sound: the 8-bit textures, the bilingual content, the beat structures borrowed from disparate dance traditions, and the complete absence of ironic distance.

Sleeping as a Position

The album closes with a song under two minutes long in which the narrator announces a preference for sleep over participation. The track is short and slightly dreamy, and functions as a thesis statement in reverse. After everything that came before (the energy, the play, the critique compressed into two-minute songs), the album ends with a quiet refusal.

This song went viral on TikTok in 2020, becoming closely associated with "Backrooms" content: internet videos of liminal spaces, empty fluorescent corridors, rooms that seem to have no exit.^[1] The pairing made a strange kind of sense. The track has an uncanny texture that fits the feeling of being caught between states, neither fully in the world nor out of it. The viral moment introduced the album to a generation of listeners who arrived through the aesthetics of digital dread rather than through music criticism.

A Debut That Got Better With Age

When Gorilla vs. Bear compiled their list of the best albums of the 2010s in December 2019, Intro Bonito appeared at number 46.^[6] For a record that began as a free SoundCloud upload and spent its first year as a small-run UK pressing, that placement represents substantial retroactive validation. The band had grown significantly by then, and listeners tracing the arc backward found that the earliest recordings held up.

Polyvinyl Record Co., the label responsible for the band's mature studio work, issued an expanded edition of Intro Bonito in April 2023 with thirteen additional tracks, including four previously unreleased songs. The reissue charted at number 42 on the Billboard Top Album Sales chart.^[1] That a decade-old self-released mixtape could appear on any sales chart at all measures how much the band's audience had grown and how well the original recordings had aged.

The band described their second album, Bonito Generation, as a move toward something "more songwriter-y" than Intro Bonito's "disjointed basslines and riffs."^[2] That self-assessment is accurate and a little misleading in equal measure. The looseness of Intro Bonito was not a failure of ambition. It was an expression of it. The toy keyboard, the short songs, the bilingual playground idioms: these were not constraints to overcome. They were the record's argument about what pop music could do with the world directly in front of it.