Try Me

Imagine condensing your entire worth as a human being into a three-minute pop song. Not a resume, not a cover letter, not an elevator pitch, but something danceable, something that might get stuck in your head on the way to an interview you are already anxious about. That is the peculiar brilliance of "Try Me," the eighth track on Kero Kero Bonito's debut studio album Bonito Generation. It arrives somewhere between a bop and a manifesto, cheerfully weaponizing the language of human resources against the systems that made it necessary.

The CV as Art Form

Released October 21, 2016, Bonito Generation arrived at a particular moment in British economic life. Austerity policies, a shrinking job market, and the long shadow of the 2008 financial crisis had converged into something like a generation-wide reckoning: what does it mean to launch yourself into a world that seems to have fewer places for you than it once promised?^[1][5] Kero Kero Bonito, a London trio composed of vocalist Sarah Midori Perry and producers Gus Lobban and Jamie Bulled, absorbed this anxiety and turned it into something joyful without pretending it wasn't real.^[2][6]

"Try Me" is the album's most direct engagement with employment as a lived experience. The narrator presents herself in the manner of a job applicant, cataloguing her skills with an almost brochure-like tidiness: she speaks multiple languages, she learns quickly, she is available year-round, she works well with others.^[4] The structure borrows from the formal conventions of a CV or job posting so deftly that it becomes both a parody and a sincere pitch simultaneously. Perry's delivery commits to the confidence completely, which is what makes the song work. She is not winking at the absurdity. She means it.

Radical Positivity and Its Discontents

KKB's members, in interviews around the album's release, spoke about their approach as a kind of "radical positivity," a phrase that could easily be misread as naivety.^[5] But Perry was careful to complicate that framing. She acknowledged that negativity is always present beneath positivity, that brightness and despair are not opposites so much as cohabitants.^[6] In "Try Me," this dialectic is audible.

The song's pre-chorus introduces a crack in the narrator's polished self-presentation: a moment of hesitation in which she acknowledges that overthinking has occasionally caused her to lose sight of her own worth.^[4] It is a brief admission, passing quickly before the confident chorus reasserts itself, but its timing is precise. The song does not linger on self-doubt; it acknowledges it, then moves on. This is the philosophy in practice. The doubt is real, but it is not the final word.

This dynamic would have resonated powerfully with young listeners in 2016 who had been trained by the job market to perform assurance they did not entirely feel. The song captures the experience of self-branding not as triumph but as labor, a labor that can be tiring even when you are genuinely good at it.

Language as Identity

One of "Try Me"'s most distinctive qualities is its bilingual architecture. Perry moves between English and Japanese across the song, a structural choice that reflects her own background. Born and raised in Otaru, Hokkaido, she relocated to the UK at age thirteen and found herself navigating two languages, two cultures, and two sets of expectations.^[2][8] She has described the mixing of English and Japanese in her songwriting as a way of asserting that both parts of herself are valid, that you can hold both identities at once without having to choose between them.^[7]

In "Try Me," the Japanese-language sections of the song carry their own metaphorical weight, describing the experience of ascending step by step, with the view improving incrementally as you climb higher.^[4] This is the song's most quietly optimistic moment: progress is not a leap but a series of small ascents. The destination is always partially obscured, but the direction is clear.

The bilingual structure also functions as part of the song's skill listing, almost literally. The narrator demonstrates her linguistic range in the act of singing. Form and content become the same thing, a piece of songwriting craft that rewards close attention.

The PC Music Context

By 2016, KKB occupied an unusual position in London's musical landscape. Their music drew on J-pop, dancehall, synth-pop, video game music, and the hyper-compressed maximalism of the PC Music scene, which was concurrently producing artists like SOPHIE and A.G. Cook.^[2][5] Cook had even co-written an earlier KKB single, "Build It Up," placing the band explicitly within that orbit. But Bonito Generation represented a step toward a more conventional radio pop structure while retaining the earnestness that distinguished KKB from their more irony-inflected contemporaries.^[5]

"Try Me" is a particularly clean example of this balance. The production by Lobban and Bulled is crisp, danceable, and brighter than sunlight, yet the theme it houses is real millennial precarity in a pop costume. This combination, genuinely felt emotion wrapped in gleaming synthetic bubblegum, would prove influential. Retrospectively, writers have identified KKB as proto-hyperpop, artists who established some of the genre's emotional architecture before hyperpop had a name.^[3][5]

Alternative Readings

The job-application framing is the most legible reading of "Try Me," but it is not the only one. The song's invitation can be understood more broadly as a statement of selfhood. The narrator is not merely applying for a position; she is asking to be seen, to be taken seriously, to be given a chance to demonstrate her value in a world that does not always make that easy.

For a bilingual woman of mixed Japanese-British heritage in London, this invitation carries resonances beyond the purely economic. Identity itself requires a kind of ongoing self-presentation, a continuous "try me" aimed at environments that may not be built for you.^[8] Perry's willingness to make that invitation into a pop hook transforms what could be exhausting into something that briefly feels like power.

There is also a reading in which the song is addressed inward as much as outward, with the narrator reminding herself of her own worth as much as advertising it to others. The moment of self-doubt followed by the reassertion of the chorus can be heard as an internal pep talk: a practice of confidence that must be repeated precisely because confidence is not a permanent state.

Why It Resonates

Bonito Generation received strong critical notices upon release. Metacritic's composite score placed it in the low eighties, with publications including Clash Magazine and DIY Magazine singling out its density of infectious hooks and its capacity to make existential anxiety feel fun.^[1][6] "Try Me" was not a single from the record, but its qualities as a piece are among the sharpest the album has to offer.

The song's durability comes from its specificity. It does not describe anxiety in the abstract. It describes the actual experience of preparing an application, of marshalling your attributes for an audience that may or may not be interested, and then somehow makes that experience feel like dancing. That is a difficult trick. Most music either validates the difficulty or tries to help you forget it. "Try Me" does something stranger: it makes you feel capable while fully acknowledging the systems that have made capability feel insufficient.

In a moment when so much cultural energy was going into naming what was broken, KKB was finding a way to sing within it. Not because they didn't see the brokenness, but because, as Perry put it, without darkness there is no light.^[7]

A Three-Minute Argument

"Try Me" is three minutes and twenty-nine seconds of a young woman telling a skeptical world what she has to offer. That she does so in two languages, over a production that sounds like sunlight through a speaker, and with just enough vulnerability to make the confidence believable, is its own kind of argument. Kero Kero Bonito did not solve generational precarity. They just made a song that understood it, and that is, sometimes, exactly enough.