Babies (Are So Strange)

A Nursery Rhyme With an Agenda

There are pop songs that disguise their seriousness beneath catchy surfaces, and then there are songs that make the disguise into the point. "Babies (Are So Strange)" by Kero Kero Bonito belongs to the second category. Its instrumental palette borrows from children's music and early Nintendo soundtracks. Its vocal delivery is bright and bouncy. Its title sounds like the opening line of a toddler's observation. And yet the song is, at its core, a quietly pointed interrogation of the expectation that women are destined to bear children and will naturally want to.

That contradiction (sincere critique wearing a party hat) is precisely what makes this track one of the more resonant entries in Kero Kero Bonito's debut mixtape, Intro Bonito.

London, a Casio Keyboard, and a Bandcamp Upload

Kero Kero Bonito formed in London in 2011. Producers Gus Lobban and Jamie Bulled, who had grown up together in Bromley, posted on MixB, an online bulletin board for Japanese expatriates living in the UK, seeking a bilingual vocalist. Sarah Midori Perry responded. She is of mixed Japanese and British heritage and had spent her first thirteen years in Otaru, Japan, before relocating to England. She had no formal singing training. She responded simply because she wanted to try something new.^[1]

Much of Intro Bonito was composed on a Casio SA-46, a cheap toy keyboard. The album's characteristic sound (part 8-bit video game, part J-pop, part dancehall) emerged from those creative limitations and the playful spirit they imposed. The band uploaded the finished mixtape to Bandcamp and SoundCloud on September 30, 2013, where it spread organically through underground communities before receiving a physical release through Double Denim Records in August 2014.^[2]

"Babies (Are So Strange)" sits at track seven, written by Lobban and Perry together. Its bilingual structure is integral: the English sections present a surface-level observation of babies as bewildering creatures, while the Japanese sections carry the song's sharper ideological freight.

The Surface and What's Underneath

The song opens from the perspective of someone confronting the reality of infant care: the sleeplessness, the constant demands, the sheer strangeness of a tiny human being. This is honest enough territory. Babies are genuinely disorienting presences. But the song does not stop at bewilderment.

In the Japanese-language passages, Perry pivots to address something more loaded: the societal pressure on women to reproduce, the cultural assumption that biological capacity equals biological destiny. The imagery she deploys draws on science fiction and horror. The specific comparison likens pregnancy to the alien creature gestating inside an unwilling human host, a reference drawn deliberately from the Alien franchise. It reframes reproduction not as a naturally desired state but as something that can be experienced as an invasion, as something happening to a body rather than chosen by one.^[3]

This is not a screed. The song never raises its voice. The melody stays bright, the keyboard stays sprightly, Perry's delivery stays conversational. The song asks its questions and then arrives at what Sarah herself has described as an ambiguous conclusion: neither a rejection of motherhood nor an uncritical endorsement of it, but an open-ended acknowledgment that the matter is more complicated than the social script suggests.^[3]

Bubblegum as Delivery System

Kero Kero Bonito have described their approach as "radical positivity," a deliberate commitment to creating genuinely upbeat music at a time when the indie landscape favored melancholy and ironic distance.^[1] Part of what makes that philosophy interesting is what it can conceal. Cheerful pop is non-threatening. It gets past defenses that a more self-serious vehicle would not.

"Babies (Are So Strange)" is a case study in this method. The pop wrapper is not cynical packaging. KKB believe in the power of catchy music and take genuine delight in constructing it. But the wrapper also does real work: it makes a listener willing to sit with a song questioning gender norms in ways they might disengage from if the song arrived announcing its intentions.

The Alien franchise metaphor deserves attention in this context. Those films are themselves long-running vehicles for thinking about bodily autonomy, the horror of involuntary reproduction, and the violence of having one's body commandeered against one's will. Its appearance in a bilingual pop song released on Bandcamp in 2013 is not accidental. Perry was reaching for exactly that freight and found a way to bring it into a genre that rarely carries it.

A Portrait of the Album

Intro Bonito is broader in thematic scope than its toy-instrument production might suggest. Across its fifteen tracks, the mixtape addresses consumer culture, ecological concerns, urban safety, and the pressures of young adult life alongside its more playful material.^[2] Sputnikmusic, in its review of the album, singled out "Babies (Are So Strange)" as a personal favorite, praising the wider lyrical range it demonstrates and the way it expands the album's thematic terrain.^[4] Gorilla vs. Bear would eventually rank Intro Bonito as the 46th best album of the 2010s, a retrospective acknowledgment of how far ahead of broader trends the mixtape had positioned itself.^[5]

The bilingual structure that shapes "Babies" is representative of the album as a whole. Perry has described her relationship to Japanese and English not as two separate modes but as a single unified expressive instrument.^[1] Her Japanese is not a styling choice or an exotic affectation. It is the language of her first thirteen years, of her emotional and imaginative formation. When the song's harder questions are put into Japanese, they are not being hidden from a Western audience. They are being expressed in the language that fits them best.

Why It Resonates

The song anticipates what would later become a recognizable strand of feminist pop: work that declines to choose between accessibility and substance, that pursues catchiness not as a retreat from seriousness but as a strategy for widening the reach of serious things. Kero Kero Bonito were doing this before the critical vocabulary to describe it had fully formed.

"Babies (Are So Strange)" is also simply an honest portrait of a feeling many people have had but rarely see reflected in pop music: the dissonance between what a body can do and what one is told a body should want to do. The sci-fi metaphor gives that dissonance its most vivid image. The cheerful melody gives it a form in which that image can travel.

The song is two minutes and thirty-six seconds long. Not everything that needs to be said takes long to say.