Build It Up

There is something subversive about a pop song that tells you, with total sincerity, that the best part of building something is eventually tearing it down. Most pop music in any language traffics in permanence: permanent love, permanent fame, permanent heartbreak. "Build It Up," released by Kero Kero Bonito in November 2014^[2], takes a different view. It treats ambition as a joyful game with no wrong answers and no lasting stakes. You choose something. You build it. You put your flag on it. And when you get bored, you knock it all down and try again.

This is the song's core emotional proposition, and it lands with the force of something obvious that nobody had quite said before.

The Band and the Moment

Kero Kero Bonito emerged from one of the more unlikely origin stories in contemporary pop. Gus Lobban and Jamie Bulled, two producers who grew up together in Bromley, south London^[2], posted an advertisement on MixB, an online bulletin board for Japanese expatriates living in the UK. They were looking for a bilingual vocalist. Sarah Midori Perry, who had spent the first thirteen years of her life in Otaru, Japan^[2], before moving to Britain, answered the ad. She had no professional singing training. She had played alto saxophone in a brass band and harbored ambitions as a visual artist and novelist, but pop music was new territory.

They clicked immediately. Perry, who performs as Sarah Bonito, brought a sensibility rooted simultaneously in J-pop aesthetics, an art school eye for imagery, and the easy fluency of someone who literally thinks in two languages at once.

"Build It Up" was released in November 2014 as a standalone single, roughly three months after the band's debut mixtape Intro Bonito. It was the band flexing into new sonic territory: slightly more polished, slightly more production-forward, reaching toward the radio pop ambitions that would fully materialize on their debut album Bonito Generation in 2016^[2].

The PC Music Orbit

To understand the sonic world this track inhabits, it helps to know where it was born. The song credits A.G. Cook as a co-writer^[6]. Cook was, at precisely this moment, the architect and impresario of PC Music, the London-based collective and label that was redefining the upper edge of bubblegum pop. PC Music's aesthetic was hyper-compressed, artificially cheerful, and intensely self-aware: pop music about pop music, delivered at a frequency designed to be both irresistible and slightly alienating.

Kero Kero Bonito shared DNA with that world. Reviewers immediately clocked the comparison. Nialler9 described the track as video game hyper-dance pop in a PC Music and J-Pop style^[3], noting the way the band sat at the intersection of two pop traditions that were, in 2014, beginning to collapse into each other. But where PC Music often deployed its confections with a cool, ironic remove, KKB leaned into genuine warmth. The song does not wink at the listener. Its enthusiasm is unguarded.

The SimCity Cosmology

The imagery the song deploys is specific and delightful: houses, solar devices, brick constructions shaped like animals, airports, cathedrals, theme parks, dinosaurs. It reads like a civilization-builder's inventory list. The comparison to an alternative bubblegum theme song for SimCity^[3] is apt, and not only stylistically. The song borrows the logic of simulation games in a deep structural way.

In games like SimCity, you are never building a permanent world. You are exploring a space of possibilities, each iteration teaching you something about what works and what does not, each demolition clearing ground for something better. The act of creation is always provisional. The bulldozer is as much a tool of joy as the crane.

The narrator of "Build It Up" takes this exact attitude toward life's choices. Picking a destination is easy. Building it up is exciting. Claiming it as your own, planting your flag, is a moment of pride. But the song does not pretend that permanence is the goal, or even desirable. When the thing you have built gets boring, the smart move is to knock it down. The only mistake is thinking that tearing something apart leaves you with nothing. It leaves you with a cleared field and a new beginning.

This is quietly radical as a philosophy for young people navigating choices that often feel irreversible: what to study, where to live, who to become. "Build It Up" treats all of these as building blocks rather than load-bearing walls.

Two Languages, One Self

The song moves between Japanese and English with a casualness that feels like breath. This bilingual flow is not decoration. It is documentation.

Sarah Midori Perry grew up straddling two cultures and two languages, spending her formative years in Japan before relocating to the UK. She has spoken about thinking and writing in both languages simultaneously, describing them as one whole thing rather than two separate modes^[5]. When the song shifts registers, it is mapping the geography of her actual mind.

For a song about choosing your destination and building your life, that bilingualism carries meaning. Immigrants and expats know the particular experience of constructing identity across cultural lines, of deciding which parts of each world to keep, which flag to plant, which things to build up in the new place. The song never becomes a literal immigrant narrative. It keeps its imagery light and playful. But underneath the cheerful surface is the quiet authority of someone who has genuinely rebuilt herself across cultures and found the process generative rather than traumatic.

The Production as Argument

The sonic palette of the track makes its own argument. The production, led by Lobban and Bulled, layers chiptune bleeps derived from handheld gaming hardware, party whistles, and a drum machine with the kind of tinny, spring-loaded energy you associate with early 1990s video games^[1]. The call-and-response structure of Perry's delivery turns the song into a conversation: statement, confirmation, elaboration, repeat.

Nothing about the sound is trying to be grand. Everything is bright and miniature and physical, like toy construction sounds scaled up to dance music tempo. Stereogum, covering the single on release, called it the best thing the band had put out so far^[1], and highlighted what the reviewer described as razor-sharp call-and-response raps alongside a production that balanced Gameboy bloops and jittery crossing guard whistles. The critic emphasized the band's skill at blending video game tropes with real-world resonance.

The effect is of something that sounds small and means large. The miniature scale of the sonic world, the plastic sounds and cartoon percussion, frames the song's philosophy not as intimidating adult wisdom but as something any listener can pick up and use immediately.

Precursor to a Bigger Sound

In retrospect, this single marks a transitional moment in KKB's career. Their debut mixtape Intro Bonito had leaned into deliberately lo-fi, hollow chiptune arrangements. The new single pointed toward the more polished pop production that would define Bonito Generation, released in October 2016. Tiny Mix Tapes, reviewing that album, noted that this track had established a direction toward radio pop that the full-length record would subsequently develop more fully^[4].

The song is a bridge, but it is not merely a bridge. It contains in miniature the complete KKB worldview: the optimism, the bilingual ease, the video game aesthetics, the insistence that starting over is always an option and never a failure.

What Else the Song Could Mean

The most appealing alternative reading of "Build It Up" is as a manifesto about the creative process itself. Artists build things, put their flags on them, show them to the world. The best artists then knock those things down and do something different before stagnation sets in. Lobban, Bulled, and Perry would themselves demonstrate this principle a few years later when they radically shifted their sound on Time 'n' Place (2018), abandoning the bubblegum palette for something rawer and more rock-inflected^[2].

You could also hear the song as a comment on online culture's construction-and-demolition cycle. In 2014, the internet was already operating at the pace of trends built up and immediately replaced, of identities performed, discarded, and rebuilt. The song's casual attitude toward starting over felt almost like a survival guide.

Why It Still Lands

There are more complex Kero Kero Bonito songs than "Build It Up." The band would go on to make stranger, sadder, and more ambitious music. But the genius of this track lies in finding the exact right level of simplicity for its subject matter. A song about the joy of building and starting over should feel effortless and renewable. This one does.

It also arrived at a moment when hyperpop and internet pop were just crystallizing as genres, and KKB were right at the intersection of several converging currents: PC Music's deconstruction of bubblegum, J-pop's colorful maximalism, and the sincere emotional accessibility that distinguishes KKB from either of those traditions at their most ironic^[3].

What Sarah Perry and her bandmates captured in three minutes and nine seconds is something that sounds like a children's game and turns out to be a complete philosophy of life: pick a direction, build something real, claim it, and when you have learned what you needed to learn, clear the ground and start again. The flag is yours to plant anywhere.