Brightness All The Way Down

There’s something about Kero Kero Bonito that makes you remember why you ever liked pop music in the first place. They’re three people from London—Sarah Bonito, Gus Lobban, Jamie Bulled—and they sound like they imported their entire musical education from Japanese pop and synthpop instead of the usual places.

Their songs are impossibly bright. ’Fish Bowl,’ ’Let’s Go To The Forest,’ titles that don’t pretend to be deep. The production is clean and synthetic, the melodies immediate, and Sarah’s voice sits in the middle of it all, high and clear and completely sincere. When she sings ’even if you fall, there’s a trampoline waiting, you just have to believe,’ there’s no distance between the words and the feeling. No irony to hide behind.

There’s this assumption in pop that you’re supposed to be cool about it, or at least aware, a little ashamed. Kero Kero Bonito rejected that entirely. They just made music about feeling good and believing in something and having hope, and in a landscape where every artist performs detachment, that reads as almost radical. It shouldn’t be radical to make something genuine, but there it is.

The thing that strikes me is how complete their commitment is. No hedging, no distance, no cool pose masking the real feeling underneath. Just brightness all the way down. I don’t know how they sustain it, honestly. The industry doesn’t reward that kind of sincerity. But people find them anyway, the ones who need music like this, who still believe pop can be joyful without being cynical.