‘I think being jarred is pretty dope,” says Gus Lobban, one third of the London band Kero Kero Bonito. I’ve described his group’s brazen, gleamingly awkward J-pop and dancehall-inspired sound as jarring – actually intended as a compliment – but it has prompted Lobban and bandmate Jamie Bulled to leap to the defence of being jarring.
“I personally love jarring music, the audacity of it,” Bulled says. “I’d rather be jarred than wrapped up nice and tight.” Lobban summons up a scene. “It’s 1979 and you’ve had so many years of the Bay City Rollers. Yes, punk’s happened, but the music’s quite anodyne. It’s like, ‘OK, what now?’ And then the Pop Group come out. Wouldn’t that be the most beautiful scenario to find yourself in? Public Image Ltd, Devo, the B-52s – all this stuff that’s completely not that. Think about it for a second: sometimes you have to be jarred to be saved.”
The Bay City Rollers aren’t the only touchstones of tedium in Kero Kero Bonito’s world. The band say their irreverent, high-concentration pop – which has seen them bracketed with the divisive PC Music collective (there are also more formal associations: Lobban releases music on the label under the moniker Kane West and the band put out a version of their debut album as remixed by various affiliated DJs) – is a reaction to the ruling class of electronic music.
“A sea of twinkly production and noises, someone not really singing, and you can’t hear what they’re saying, and goes on for like 20 minutes,” is how Lobban sums up the likes of the xx, Four Tet and Burial. “And we were just like, ‘What the fuck is that? That doesn’t speak to us’.”
In retaliation, the band wanted to make “the most direct new pop music you could make”, Lobban says. “Concise, hyper-precise. Like, no element wasted. So in a track like My Party, it’s just bassline, vocals, super-clear message, some funny sounds and a tight structure – and that’s it. Nothing more needed.’
Lobban and Bulled met as teenagers on the south London schoolboy band scene at the turn of the decade. They decided to form a band in 2013, with the initial premise for their style being “minimal and international”, according to Bulled. They recruited vocalist Sarah Midori Perry via an online advert (“probably saying something really embarrassing like: ‘Do you like the B-52s and rapping and acid house?’” Lobban says). She “never had a singing background”, she says, but “wanted to try it, so I just jumped in.” The trio bonded over a love of J-pop, and Perry developed their half-Japanese, half-English spoken-singing style (she’s fluent in both), and most of the cute props the band use on stage.
Within months, Kero Kero Bonito had uploaded a mix to SoundCloud, which was picked up by London indie Double Denim and released as their debut album, Intro Bonito – strange, dazzling pop songs on topics including cats, dogs, parties, and the distorting effects of selfie culture, the following year.
Now, as they prepare to record their second album and go out on a European and American tour, the group is turning into a full-time job. They still don’t live off the band’s earnings, though, instead preferring to channel it back in to their music and videos. Kero Kero Bonito – and their PC Music cousins – are very much DIY acts, which isn’t initially that obvious considering the sound they make is the opposite of the lo-fi guitar rock associated with DIY culture.
But now that professional music software has fallen into the hands of the great unwashed – and anybody can create a slick online image, everyone can make glossy pop. “The power of DIY in this day and age is almost the same power as a major label or massive corporation,” says Lobban. “And it’s like, ‘What’s the greatest level of craft we can attain by doing it DIY?’ There’s no reason it can’t be [as] well-crafted as a Max Martin record or an Autechre record. We can just go: ‘Let’s make the perfect music’.”
Listen to Kero Kero Bonito, however, and it will become clear that “the perfect music” is subjective. But there are a few very specific ingredients in the band’s formula that make it feel so immeasurably right and gratifying to specific ears.
Many are formative: as well as J-pop, there are the sonic accompaniments to Japanese culture like Pokémon and Super Mario; the Eurodance that soundtracked many a 90s childhood (Cotton Eye Joe, Whigfield’s Saturday Night and Gina G), the latter of which were often underpinned by dancehall and reggae rhythms. The band also cite Scritti Politti – the Marxist post-punks whose sleek 80s synthpop was like a British take on soul music – as an important reference point. “We’d have conversations with [our peers] about it and they’re like yeah, Scritti Politti’s way better than Burial’. That’s just like, a given,” Lobban says.
Although it’s possible to dissect their musical habitat, there’s no doubt that the band and their peers are steering pop into a world of new potential. From inventing genres (they label their music both “bilingual schoolyard dancehall” and “pop utopia”) to implicating themselves in a huge amount of side projects, the internet has allowed everyone to construct pop music in their own image, and Kero Kero Bonito are refreshing everything.
Kero Kero Bonito play the Courtyard Theatre, London, on 14 and 15 April.
