Kero Kero Bonito

Since 2011 · United Kingdom

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Time 'n' Place (2018)

Time 'n' Place trades Kero Kero Bonito's earlier bright, hyper-melodic electronic pop for live guitars and a genuinely anxious undertone, the sound of a band deliberately unsettling its own audience. "Make Believe" carries that tension clearly, its jittery guitar and Sarah Midori Perry's still-bright vocal sitting uneasily against lyrics considerably darker than the band's earlier work suggested. The record's suburban unease drew on a specific, deliberately un-glamorous well of British and American guitar music rather than any electronic lineage. It stands as the album that proved the band's earlier cheerfulness was a choice rather than a limitation.

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Kero Kero Bonito

Time 'n' Place · 2018

Kero Kero Bonito formed in London in 2011 around producers Gus Lobban and Jamie Bulled, later joined by vocalist Sarah Midori Perry after they found her through an online talent search, blending playful, hyper-melodic electronic pop sung partly in Japanese and partly in English. Their early mixtapes and singles leaned toward bright, video-game-indebted production, building a devoted online following well before the band toured widely or signed to a proper label.

Time 'n' Place, their second album, arrived in 2018 and marked a deliberate turn toward live guitars and a more anxious, less immediately cheerful atmosphere than the music that had built their audience. The band continued expanding their sound on subsequent releases, moving between that guitar-driven direction and a return to denser electronic production depending on the record. Kero Kero Bonito's catalog now reads as a study in refusing to stay put in any single genre, treating each album as license to start over.