Waking Up

Most pop music about mornings is secretly about something else entirely. But Waking Up, the opening track of Kero Kero Bonito's 2016 debut album Bonito Generation, takes its premise at face value with cheerful literalism: getting out of bed is hard, and doing it anyway matters. There is a disarming honesty in that simplicity, and a considerable amount of art hiding inside it.

A Band Assembled Across Cultures

Kero Kero Bonito came together in 2011 through an unusual process. Producers Gus Lobban and Jamie Bulled, who had grown up together in Bromley, south London, placed an advertisement on MixB, an online community for Japanese speakers living in the UK.^[1] They were looking for a bilingual vocalist. Sarah Midori Perry, who had spent the first thirteen years of her life in Otaru, Japan before moving to England, responded. She was not a trained singer, but her bilingual fluency offered something neither Lobban nor Bulled could manufacture. The three clicked immediately, and KKB was born.

Perry's dual cultural inheritance is not just a biographical footnote. It shapes how the band processes everything from production choices to lyrical register. She has described experiencing English and Japanese not as distinct languages but as a single, expanded palette, noting that writing in both at once gives her access to twice as much expressive material.^[3] This philosophy runs through Waking Up, which weaves between the two languages in the band's characteristically fluid way.

From Sleep to Wakefulness

The placement of Waking Up as the album's opening track is not incidental. Bonito Generation ends with "Hey Parents," an intimate bilingual letter from a young adult to her family. It begins with a song about getting out of bed. The album's structural logic suggests a single day, or perhaps a single chapter of a young life, traced from its earliest difficult moment to its looking-back conclusion.^[2]

There is a more specific resonance at play. KKB's debut mixtape Intro Bonito (2014) closes with a quiet, introspective track called "I'd Rather Sleep," about the desire to remain in bed and away from the world's demands.^[1] Waking Up answers that sentiment directly. The melancholy conclusion of one project becomes the unresolved question that the next project opens with, and then resolves by choosing to get up anyway. The transition traces a small but meaningful arc: from avoidance to engagement, from paralysis to motion.

That arc is not triumphant in any grand sense. The song does not promise that the day ahead will be extraordinary. It simply acknowledges that waking up is hard, notes that it is also necessary, and then launches forward with irrepressible energy. The narrator tallies her night's sleep in the language of counting sheep, acknowledges a full roster of daily obligations, and decides to face them. That is the whole story. The craft lies in how much life KKB load into that small container.

Maximalism in Miniature

The song runs under three minutes, which is fitting for a track about not wanting to linger. The production, handled by Lobban and Bulled, is characteristic of their approach: synth-pop horns, punchy bass, video-game-adjacent sound effects, and a rhythmic structure drawn from dancehall and electropop. One early review noted that the opener delivers "a huge taste of what the album is like, with the sound effects and horns, so in-your-face yet confident."^[6] The Edge described the record overall as music that blends "post-punk, new wave, J-pop, and electro" into something "sophisticated and delightfully eccentric."^[6]

Perry's vocal performance is central to the track's emotional effect. Her delivery oscillates between weariness and bright resolve, mimicking the actual psychology of a reluctant morning in compressed form. The call-and-response structure, a hallmark of J-pop and dancehall influences, gives the song a communal quality, as if the internal monologue of getting up has been set to a format that invites participation.

The production philosophy behind Bonito Generation is worth understanding. Lobban has described the compositional process as analogous to solving a puzzle, with every element needing to lock precisely into place. "We added more chords, basically," Bulled noted, a dryly understated summary of what is actually a more developed harmonic and structural sophistication compared to their debut mixtape.^[3] Within that architecture, Waking Up functions as a declaration of intent: here is what this band sounds like when working at full efficiency.

Hyperpop Before Hyperpop

Bonito Generation was released in October 2016, before "hyperpop" had fully crystallized as a genre designation. In retrospect, the album is frequently cited among the early templates for what became a significant strand of 2010s and 2020s pop: synthetic, maximalist, emotionally earnest, genre-fluid, and unconcerned with ironic distance. KKB's connection to the PC Music scene (A.G. Cook co-wrote their 2014 single "Build It Up") placed them adjacent to that laboratory,^[1] but the band's approach was warmer and more autobiographically grounded than much of what surrounded them.

Waking Up, as the album's entry point, captures this position precisely. It is loud and synthetic, but it is also genuinely, unaffectedly about something real: the daily friction between rest and obligation, between wanting to stay withdrawn and needing to engage. Metacritic collected a score in the low eighties for the album, indicating strong critical consensus.^[7] Clash Magazine gave it nine out of ten, calling the production "disarmingly joyous" while noting a "predilection for early nineties dance." AllMusic awarded four out of five stars, describing the record as "a winning mix of subversive art and genuine heart."^[5] The album's Japanese release through Sony Music Entertainment Japan in July 2017 extended its reach considerably, an appropriate landing for a band with one foot planted on each side of the Pacific.

The Earnestness Argument

There is a temptation to read KKB's relentless brightness as a pose, or as a deliberate inversion of indie rock's earnest-serious conventions. But the band has pushed back against the idea that their positivity is a strategy rather than a sincere disposition. Lobban has argued that pop music is "actually capable of more than it sometimes is used for, can be pushed to sort of extreme heights," and that the best contemporary records "take the good things from all the different spheres and zones of music and form a unique statement."^[4]

Waking Up is a good test case for this argument. Its subject matter is not the kind of material that typically invites serious attention. KKB treat it seriously anyway, not by over-explaining or sentimentalizing, but by crafting a musical environment so committed and fully realized that it demands engagement on its own terms. The song's lightness is not the absence of depth. It is what depth looks like when you are not trying to perform gravity.

An Album's First Breath

Looking back at Bonito Generation nearly a decade after its release (a Polyvinyl reissue in 2019 helped introduce it to a wider audience^[2]), Waking Up holds up as one of those rare opening tracks that fully inhabits its function. It does not arrive as a prologue or a tease. It is already the record, in compressed form.

Every day begins the same way: the slow assembly of consciousness, the negotiation with comfort, the decision to continue. "Waking Up" found a way to make that moment feel like the beginning of something worth getting out of bed for. That is a genuinely difficult thing to accomplish, and Kero Kero Bonito does it in under three minutes with a horn section and a call-and-response chorus. The hardest part, as it turns out, is also the most essential. That is the whole album, really, in a single sentence.