Kero Kero Bonito

Kero Kero Bonito is a British indie pop group formed in London in 2011^[1]. The trio consists of vocalist Sarah Midori Perry and producers and multi-instrumentalists Gus Lobban and Jamie Bulled. Lobban and Bulled grew up together in Bromley, south London^[1], and sought a bilingual vocalist by posting an advertisement on MixB, an online community for Japanese expatriates living in the UK.

Sarah Midori Perry, who performs as Sarah Bonito, is of mixed Japanese and British descent and spent the first thirteen years of her life in Otaru, Japan before relocating to the UK^[1]. She responded to the MixB advertisement despite having no formal singing training, having previously played alto saxophone in a brass band and pursued visual art and novel-writing. The three clicked immediately, and Perry later described realizing through her first rap on an early track that music opened a new world of expression.

Perry's Japanese upbringing gave her a deep familiarity with the Japanese singer-songwriter tradition, particularly the work of Yumi Matsutoya, known as Yuming, whose melodically rich and emotionally textured pop from the 1970s and 1980s has remained a touchstone in Japanese popular music. The band has specifically cited Yuming as a shared musical reference between Perry and her mother, one that directly informed the song "Swimming" on Time 'n' Place: a track they described as a tribute to their mothers and to that generation of Japanese singer-songwriters.^[16] This cross-cultural lineage, British indie production meeting Japanese pop sensibility, has always been central to the band's identity.

The band's early music drew on J-pop, dancehall, video game music, and the hyper-compressed bubblegum pop of the PC Music scene. The group is categorized among PC Music artists, a connection underscored by A.G. Cook's co-writing credit on their 2014 single "Build It Up."^[2] Their debut mixtape Intro Bonito arrived in August 2014, followed by their debut studio album Bonito Generation in October 2016, which marked a shift toward a more polished radio pop sound. The album received strong critical notices on release: Clash Magazine called it "packed with breezy, witty, should-be hits",^[21] and DIY Magazine noted the band had "perfected the quick fix formula."^[22] Lobban later described the production process as analogous to solving a tiling puzzle, with every element needing to lock into place before the whole could work.^[18]

In early 2018, the group released TOTEP, a four-track EP that announced a dramatic change in artistic direction. Produced entirely by Lobban, the EP traded the group's bubblegum palette for noise pop, shoegaze, and rawer emotional textures, drawing on unexpected touchstones including Mount Eerie's grief-centered A Crow Looked at Me and My Bloody Valentine's wall-of-noise approach.^[12] The shift was driven by genuine personal upheaval: Perry has cited the demolition of her childhood home and the closure of her primary school as experiences that made the irreversibility of time feel viscerally real.^[13] Lobban described the band's ethos in this era as an acknowledgment of difficulty coupled with a stubborn belief that better times would return.^[12] He also described growing bored with what he called poptimism, pointing to a "pervasive anxiety in 2018" that made the bubblegum approach feel dishonest as an artistic starting point.^[14] Lobban also experienced his father being hospitalized during this period; songs like "Visiting Hours" on Time 'n' Place document those hospital visits directly.^[15]

TOTEP was followed in October 2018 by Time 'n' Place, the group's most critically acclaimed album and the fullest realization of the sound previewed on the EP. That same year, the live lineup expanded to include Jennifer Walton on drums and sampler and James Rowland on guitar, giving the group a fuller stage presence for touring.^[4] Sarah Perry has spoken about her bilingualism as a unified creative mode rather than two separate identities, describing her work in Japanese and English as "one whole thing."^[3] She also pursues music as a solo DJ and electronic artist under the name Cryalot.

A defining characteristic of the band's early work is what they have called a philosophy of "radical positivity." At a time when much of the indie landscape favored melancholy or ironic detachment, KKB committed to making genuinely upbeat music without apology. Gus Lobban has noted that the music industry often dismissed positive-sounding work as unserious, and the band's response was to treat cheerfulness as a creative and political choice rather than a commercial concession.^[5]

The Civilisation project began after the band witnessed the 2018 Camp Fire wildfires destroying Paradise, California while on a US tour. The experience catalyzed a shift toward civilizational-scale themes in the band's work.^[1] The first Civilisation EP arrived in 2019, followed by Civilisation II in April 2021, which Lobban largely recorded in his bedroom during COVID-19 lockdowns using a single Korg DSS-1 synthesizer.^[8] The project drew on eclectic theoretical frameworks, including Svetlana Boym's concept of "off-modernism," Jon Hassell's "Fourth World Music" (blending disparate cultural sounds into imagined worlds), and what the band called "junk musicology," a deliberate interrogation of nostalgia for vintage technology.^[9] The compiled Civilisation collection was released in September 2021 via Polyvinyl Record Co.

In 2020, Kero Kero Bonito wrote and recorded the theme song for the video game Bugsnax by Young Horses, a PlayStation 5 launch title.^[6] The song premiered as part of Sony's PS5 reveal event in June 2020, where it became an immediate viral phenomenon, widely described as the most talked-about moment of the presentation.

In 2023, the band composed "Legendary," the official theme song for the Pokemon World Championships, continuing their work at the intersection of game culture and indie pop.^[1]

Two tracks from the band's catalog became unexpected viral phenomena years after their release. An animated parody built around the song "Flamingo" from Bonito Generation accumulated more than 25 million views online^[1]. Then in 2020, "I'd Rather Sleep," the closing track of Intro Bonito, found a second life on TikTok through its association with the Backrooms internet creepypasta, its short, melancholy outro providing an unexpectedly resonant soundtrack for that strain of uncanny online storytelling^[1]. Both moments demonstrated how music recorded far from any commercial mainstream could accumulate a devoted audience that carried it into unexpected cultural territory.