Big City

The Loneliness of Arrival

There is a specific kind of loneliness that belongs to big cities: the loneliness of being surrounded by millions of people and feeling utterly invisible among them. For Sarah Midori Perry, the vocalist of Kero Kero Bonito, this was not an abstract concept. She had lived it. Having grown up in Otaru, a small port city on Japan's northern island of Hokkaido, she relocated to the UK in her early teens^[1]. The city was large, the social scaffolding of childhood had been left behind on the other side of the world, and the experience of being simultaneously displaced and invisible was something she carried with her for years. "Big City," the fifth track on Kero Kero Bonito's 2016 debut album Bonito Generation, turns that experience into a tightly coiled pop song. In under three minutes, it traces a complete emotional arc: isolation acknowledged, agency reclaimed, belonging constructed from scratch.

Background: Between Two Worlds

Kero Kero Bonito formed in London when producers Gus Lobban and Jamie Bulled, both raised in Bromley in south London, posted an advertisement seeking a bilingual Japanese and English vocalist. They placed the ad on MixB, an online community for Japanese expatriates living in the UK, driven by a shared interest in Japanese hip-hop and the experimental pop scene developing around them^[1]. Perry responded without formal singing experience, having pursued visual art and novel-writing rather than music. The three clicked almost immediately, and the trio that would become KKB was formed.

The band released their debut mixtape Intro Bonito in August 2014, and spent the following two years developing the songs that would become Bonito Generation. The album was completed in early August 2016 and released October 21, 2016 on Double Denim Records^[2]. Its twelve tracks explore the interior landscape of young adulthood in the UK: graduation, job searching, social media, city living, and the question of where one belongs in a world that often feels too large and too fast. In the band's own framing, the album was a record for and about their generation.

"Big City" was co-written by Perry and Lobban, and its autobiographical resonance is unmistakable. The song maps Perry's own lived experience of arriving in a new and overwhelming urban environment, feeling lost within it, and then making a deliberate choice to change her circumstances^[8]. In that sense, it is not just a song about a city; it is a song about a specific woman at a specific moment in her life, rendered with enough emotional precision to become universal.

The City as Mirror and Canvas

The city in "Big City" functions simultaneously as problem and solution. In the song's early movements, it looms as an overwhelming, indifferent presence: vast, anonymous, and uninterested in any one person's arrival. The narrator describes a state of isolation so thorough it feels like disappearing. This is not a romanticized urban landscape of neon and possibility; it is the city as experienced by someone who does not yet belong to it, compounded by the cultural and linguistic displacement Perry herself navigated as a Japanese young woman newly living in London.

What distinguishes the song from a standard account of urban alienation is the pivot that arrives midway through. The narrator's response to loneliness is not resignation or retreat. It is action. In a sequence that maps directly onto Perry's biography, the song describes a deliberate act of self-reinvention: a haircut as symbolic fresh start, followed by finding and joining a band^[8]. The haircut detail is precisely the kind of thing that makes pop writing work. It is small enough to be completely personal, universal enough to be recognized by anyone who has ever done something minor to their appearance in a moment of needing to feel like a slightly different version of themselves. A haircut is not a solution to anything, and yet it is also exactly that.

The band's philosophy of what they called "radical positivity" is central to understanding how the song earns its resolution^[4]. Lobban and Bulled have spoken about their deliberate choice to make hopeful music at a time when positivity in indie circles was often met with suspicion or treated as commercial compromise rather than a legitimate creative stance. "If you sound sad or offensive you're a band," Bulled observed, "and if you sound positive, you're joking"^[4]. But "Big City" is not naive. It earns its optimism by sitting with discomfort first. The loneliness is real, named, and unadorned. The resolution feels earned because it arrives after, not in place of, genuine difficulty.

Perry has articulated this emotional philosophy directly. She described the album's vision as one that acknowledges "there's always negativity under positivity," aiming for something that is "not all flowers, but not all doom and gloom either"^[3]. "Big City" is one of the clearest expressions of this on the record. It holds both registers at once: the bleakness of arrival and the warmth of having survived it.

The bilingual structure of the song reinforces its dual-world themes. Kero Kero Bonito's practice of weaving Japanese and English is not a novelty feature. It reflects Perry's actual daily experience of moving between two languages and two cultural registers, a lived reality she has described as "one whole thing" rather than two separate identities^[1]. In "Big City," the Japanese passages carry their own emotional weight, providing texture and depth that the English sections alone cannot fully articulate. The song does not ask listeners to choose between cultures. It invites them into the space where they overlap.

A Generational Document

Bonito Generation landed in a specific and fraught cultural moment. The album was released in October 2016, months after the Brexit vote had reshaped the UK's political atmosphere and deepened anxieties about identity, belonging, and what it meant to be from somewhere in an increasingly fractured national conversation. A band whose vocalist had literally migrated across the world, and whose music blended British and Japanese cultural references as a matter of creative identity, was making an implicit argument for hybridity as a resource rather than a complication.

The band has been explicit about their generational ambitions for the album. In interviews around the release, they described their peers as feeling underrepresented by the existing cultural landscape: a UK millennial generation facing a shrinking economic horizon and a political culture that did not seem to speak to them^[5]. Their insistence on making music from a place of genuine hopefulness, rather than ironic detachment or despair, was a deliberate artistic and political choice.

The album earned substantial critical recognition on release, achieving a Metacritic score of 81 out of 100^[7]. AllMusic described it as "a winning mix of subversive art and genuine heart"^[10], while DIY Magazine called the band's approach "the perfect quick fix formula" and described the record as "a dozen giant would-be singles"^[6]. The Guardian noted the album's ability to evoke the slickness of kawaii J-pop while gesturing back toward an era of high-concept chart pop.

Bonito Generation now occupies a significant place in music history as a foundational document of what would eventually be called hyperpop. KKB emerged in 2016 alongside the PC Music collective (A.G. Cook, SOPHIE, and others) as part of a movement that took the maximalism and sugary aesthetics of early-2000s pop and rebuilt them from the ground up using digital production tools^[2]. Their specific contribution was to demonstrate that this aesthetic could carry genuine emotional weight. Bright, bubbly production did not have to be ironic to be meaningful. "Big City" exemplifies this: it is sonically warm and inviting in a way that could easily be mistaken for surface-level cheerfulness, but its emotional architecture is more complex than first contact suggests.

Their role in bridging Japanese and Western pop also carries cultural significance beyond genre classification. A review of their 2016 London concert from the Japan Society UK described the band as "introducing a new audience to J-pop" and observed that audiences engaged meaningfully with the Japanese-language sections of the performance even without understanding every word^[9]. Perry's bilingualism was not translating one culture for another; it was demonstrating that both could occupy the same space at once.

Alternative Interpretations

While the autobiographical reading of "Big City" is well-supported by the band's own statements and Perry's background, the song functions equally well as a parable about finding agency in impersonal environments more broadly. The haircut and the band can be read as placeholders for any deliberate act of self-construction in an unfamiliar context: starting a new job, joining a community, showing up somewhere alone and deciding to stay.

The resolution is not that the city became smaller or friendlier. The city does not change. What changes is the narrator's relationship to it. This is a meaningful distinction. The song does not promise that places become home if you wait long enough. It suggests that belonging is something you build rather than something that arrives.

There is also a reading that focuses on the act of code-switching the song itself performs. By moving between Japanese and English within a single work, Perry enacts the same kind of navigation she describes in the narrative: claiming space in two cultures at once rather than having to choose between them. The bilingual performance is not just a stylistic choice; it is a demonstration of the very hybridity the song celebrates.

The SoundCloud caption the band chose for the track, "Cos we stick around anyway," points to one more layer of interpretation. It is a philosophy of resilient persistence, an acknowledgment that the city will not always welcome you and that you choose to be there regardless. The decision to stay, to make a life in a place that has given you no particular reason to feel at home, becomes the song's central act.^[8]

Conclusion

"Big City" is three minutes of hard-won optimism from someone who had genuinely earned it. Sarah Perry did arrive in a large, disorienting city. She did feel invisible in it. And she did make a deliberate choice to change her situation, a choice that led directly to one of the most distinctive bands in contemporary British indie pop. The song captures the experience of that moment with enough specificity and emotional honesty to make it resonate far beyond its autobiographical origins.

Kero Kero Bonito would go on to release more sonically ambitious work, including the noise-pop pivot of Time 'n' Place in 2018^[2]. But Bonito Generation, and "Big City" within it, remains the clearest early statement of what the band believed: that positivity is not the absence of difficulty but the choice to keep going in spite of it. That making something, anything, is a form of self-determination. And that sometimes the most radical thing you can do is get a haircut and start a band.