There’s a Trampoline Waiting for You

Pop gets written off so often as a commercial category rather than an artistic one—songs engineered for playlist placement, built to avoid alienating any algorithm, stripped of anything that requires interpretation. Which is accurate for a lot of it. But pop is also a tradition with real aesthetic possibilities, and Kero Kero Bonito are one of the more convincing arguments for that.

The London trio—Sarah Bonito, Gus Lobban, and Jamie Bulled—make music that sounds like what would happen if J-pop aesthetics collided with British indie sensibility, which is essentially exactly what happened. Their obvious reference points are Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, Perfume, AKB48—the maximalist, candy-colored end of Japanese pop. The translation doesn’t dilute anything; it becomes its own thing. Song titles like "Fish Bowl" and "Let’s Go to the Forest." Lyrics that oscillate between naive and sincere. A production palette that lands somewhere between arcade cabinet and daydream.

The sweetness could be cloying. It is, a little—in the way that’s pleasant rather than nauseating. Listening to Bonito Generation is a genuine teeth-hurt experience, sugar-high pop that makes no apology for what it’s doing. But underneath the bright primary colors of the whole project, there’s a real emotional generosity. Even if you fall, it’s okay, Sarah sings. There’s a trampoline waiting for you. It’s so simple, you just have to believe. Which is a ridiculous sentiment and also one I find myself returning to more often than I’d like to admit.

There’s something specific about putting on music this relentlessly optimistic while your actual life is doing what actual lives do. The dissonance isn’t unpleasant. You can hear the gap between what the song insists and what you know—and somehow the song wins anyway. Kero Kero Bonito probably won’t fix anything for you. But they’ll make the not-fixing feel briefly survivable, which is not nothing at all.