It's Bugsnax!

A Song That Stopped the Internet

In June 2020, Sony's PlayStation 5 reveal event was one of the most anticipated gaming showcases in years. Hardware reveals typically live or die by exclusive titles and technical specifications. But the moment that captured the internet's collective attention was a trailer for a game nobody had heard of, accompanied by a relentlessly catchy, synth-driven theme from a British indie pop trio called Kero Kero Bonito.^[3] Within hours, the song was more discussed than any other element of the event. People looped it, shared it, and spent the rest of the day unsuccessfully trying to get it out of their heads.

The game was Bugsnax, developed by Young Horses, the Chicago indie studio behind Octodad: Dadliest Catch. Its premise: a remote island where insects and snack foods have fused into living, catchable hybrid creatures. The song matched the premise with the same manic internal logic. By the time the full track dropped at Summer Game Fest in July 2020, it had already outgrown its promotional function. For a few genuinely surreal weeks, it was the song of the summer.

The Commission and the Craft

When Young Horses approached Kero Kero Bonito about writing a theme song for Bugsnax, they came with a clear reference point: two existing KKB tracks that captured the sound and energy they wanted.^[1] Developer Phil Tibitoski later described choosing the band because of their good energy and the way their songs managed to be both cute and genuinely danceable.^[7] Gus Lobban, the band's principal producer and songwriter, took the brief and built something that felt completely at home in the KKB catalog while also functioning as real game music in the tradition he had grown up loving.

The full song was released on July 20, 2020, at Summer Game Fest, more than a month after the snippet had already circulated widely. That November, iam8bit pressed a 7-inch vinyl of the single on translucent strawberry-red wax, with a sleeve that smelled of strawberries.^[8] The physical object embodied the song's own logic: cheerful, tactile, and edible-adjacent.

The production was built around D-Am chord changes in Mixolydian mode. Lobban wrote in a PlayStation Blog post that this created what he called a "lost world atmosphere, positive, but with a definite note of mystical intrigue, much like Bugsnax itself."^[1] The instrumentation drew on a Roland JV-1010 module from 2000, a DX7 synthesizer for the opening melody, pan flutes deliberately evoking N64-era adventure game soundtracks, and a kalimba.^[1] Lobban was channeling the warm, looping wonder of fifth-generation game soundtracks. The pan flutes were not incidental; they were a conscious invocation of childhood discovery.

The recording itself was shaped by unusual external circumstances. This was the first Kero Kero Bonito song completed using the band's newly established remote recording setup, assembled out of necessity during COVID-19. Sarah Perry recorded her vocals from her own space.^[1] According to Lobban, she nailed them on the first take. Crucially, neither he nor the rest of the band knew that the song would serve as the centerpiece of the PS5 reveal; they were only told it would appear at an event.^[6] The scale of the response surprised everyone involved.

Worlds of Delight, Worlds of Strange

On its surface, the song works as pure, exuberant welcome. It introduces a world and its inhabitants with the same energy a children's nature documentary might use, inviting the listener to feel immediately at home on an island governed by rules that make no ordinary sense. Perry's vocal performance is key to this. She delivers the material with warmth and barely-contained enthusiasm, a tour guide who genuinely cannot believe how good this place is and cannot wait for you to see it.

Lobban has described finding inspiration in the Octodad theme by Ian McKinney, which worked by making the protagonist's name the entire hook.^[1] He applied the same principle here: by building the song's central refrain around the word "Bugsnax" itself, the song trains listeners to find genuine pleasure in the sound, to feel the rightness of these creatures' existence just from the syllables of their name. It is a pop trick as old as pop music, but executed with precise understanding of why it works.

The choice of Mixolydian mode is worth pausing on. In Western music, this scale has a particular quality: bright but slightly unresolved, neither triumphant nor melancholic. It is the mode of certain folk traditions, of psychedelic rock that opens onto something larger than itself, of video game music that conveys wonder rather than victory. By grounding the song in this scale, Lobban gave it an undercurrent of the uncanny. The island is real. You are welcome. But the rules here are not entirely the ones you know.

This ambiguity is not accidental. Bugsnax as a game contains a significant narrative twist: the creatures, for all their cheerful appearance, harbor a darker secret beneath the surface. Remarkably, the song's lyrics foreshadow this twist for anyone who knows to look.^[4] Players who returned to the song after completing the game noticed that specific word choices and images pointed toward the game's disturbing conclusion the entire time. The song functions simultaneously as guileless invitation and concealed warning, a tonal feat that most theme songs never attempt and almost none could pull off.

Gaming's Song of the Summer

Very few pieces of music have ever dominated a gaming hardware announcement. The PS5 reveal was one of the most anticipated gaming events in years, and its lasting cultural legacy includes, among other things, a song about bug-snacks from a London trio most gamers had never heard of.^[3]

The timing was strange and perfect. Summer 2020 was a particular kind of cultural moment. People were isolated, anxious, and hungry for uncomplicated joy. A song about a colorful island full of catchable creature-snacks offered something real: permission to be delighted by an absurd premise without needing it to mean anything beyond itself. Within days of the reveal, as Lobban noted, the song had been covered by metal bands and folk artists, incorporated into memes, and adopted by communities well outside the gaming press.^[1]

For Kero Kero Bonito themselves, the moment served as an unexpected crossover. As Jamie Bulled told The FADER in 2021, the Bugsnax moment "opened us up to a bunch of people... loads of gaming communities hearing about us for the first time."^[2] For a band with a devoted following in indie pop circles, it introduced them to an audience that responded viscerally to exactly what they had always done: make music that is sincere, precise, and relentlessly fun.

Two Songs in One

There is a straightforward reading of the song as occasion music, a promotional track designed to sell a game. That reading is reductive but not entirely wrong. The song was commissioned, written to a brief, and deployed at a corporate event. Pop music has a long tradition of such commissions, and some of the best songs in that tradition succeed precisely because the constraints imposed on them force clarity. Every word has to earn its place when the job is to introduce a world in under four minutes.

But the song resists being merely functional. The hidden narrative layer, the production choices that invoke both childhood nostalgia and something slightly off-kilter, the fact that the song has continued to circulate years after the game's launch: all of this points to a work that exceeds its brief. A genuinely disposable piece of promotional music does not generate folk covers and metal covers. It does not get analyzed for secret narrative foreshadowing.^[4]

Viewed through the lens of the band's broader output, the song can be heard as a statement about KKB's aesthetic philosophy. The band has always made music that takes literal pleasure in ordinary or absurd subjects, songs about flamingos, sport, and the satisfaction of accumulating small things. "It's Bugsnax!" is the logical extreme of that impulse: a world in which the absurd is not a metaphor for anything else but a literal premise, and the only appropriate response to it is sincere, sustained delight. From this angle, the song is not really about a video game. It is about the act of encountering something strange and choosing to love it rather than question it.^[5]

Still Stuck in Your Head

In the days after the song's release, Lobban wrote that "It's Bugsnax!" had already become one of his favorite KKB moments. He addressed the people who found it lodged in their brains with a note of knowing mischief: it isn't over yet.^[1]

That prediction was accurate. The song achieved a kind of cultural persistence not through the usual channels of critical acclaim or radio rotation but through sheer replitability. It is the kind of thing you find yourself humming in a supermarket and only realize several seconds later.

The song's genius is its commitment. There is no irony here, no wink at the audience, no signal that the premise is anything less than completely worth your full emotional engagement. Perry delivers the vocals as if reporting a genuine discovery. The arrangement treats the material with the care one might bring to a concert hall composition. The absurdity and the sincerity are not in tension; they are the same thing. That fusion is, ultimately, what makes Kero Kero Bonito distinctive as a creative force, and "It's Bugsnax!" remains one of the most persuasive arguments for why it matters.