Cooking up an eccentric concoction of glitchy arcade game soundtracks, sparkly 1980s synths, girl group hooks and J-Pop innocence, London trio Kero Kero Bonito surfaced in 2014 drenched in lo-fi, kaleidoscopic kitsch, quickly earning a reputation as young, screwball, pop mavericks. Childhood friends Gus Lobban and Jamie Bulled grew up making dance tracks, playing in bands and working in nightclubs together, but began taking an interest in Japanese pop artists such as Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, Hiroshi Sato and Tatsuro Yamashita. It led them to advertise for a singer on the site MixB (a message board for Japanese ex-pats in Britain), and in 2011 they teamed up with Sarah Midori Perry, who was born to an English father and Japanese mother and had lived on the Japanese island of Hokkaido until she was 13. They clicked immediately and Perry's airy, candyfloss vocals and childlike raps in both English and Japanese helped make early mixtape 'Intro Bonito' and the EP 'Bonito Recycling' templates for their brand of DIY, wonky, global synthpop, landing them a deal with label Double Denim.
Describing their sound as "bilingual schoolyard dancehall" and "pop utopia", their debut album 'Bonito Generation' in 2016 typically leaped through nursery rhymes, anime fantasies, dancehall rhythms, woozy bass lines and 'Mario Kart 64' samples, loosely tracing a giddy journey from adolescence into young adulthood. They also remixed artists including Saint Etienne, Frankie Cosmos and Jonah Baseball on EP 'Bonito (Retakes)' and Lobban released tracks under the moniker Kane West before changing direction and embracing the bittersweet, new wave indie of My Bloody Valentine, Belle & Sebastian and Mount Eerie on the less playful, more textured, melancholy second album 'Time 'n' Place' in 2018.
