Kero Kero Bonito: Intro Bonito [POLYVINYL]

Why you'll love it

Polyvinyl's reissue brings the 2013 debut to vinyl with a download code that includes the bonus tracks from the expanded edition. The reissue reached the Billboard Top Album Sales chart, and Gorilla vs. Bear ranked Intro Bonito among the best albums of the 2010s.

This edition

• Download card included
• Includes digital bonus tracks

About the album

Kero Kero Bonito began with an advert. Gus Lobban and Jamie Bulled, two producers from Bromley, posted on a bulletin board for Japanese expats looking for a singer, and Sarah Midori Perry, Sarah Bonito on record, answered. She switches between Japanese and English, and the songs that resulted sound like a video game, a dancehall party and a J-pop playground all at once.

Many of them were written on a Casio SA-46 mini keyboard. "Sick Beat" is about beating someone at a computer game, "Homework" and "Pocket Crocodile" turn school and childhood into bouncing earworms, "Babies (Are So Strange)" is exactly what it says, and "My Party" and "Park Song" feel like sunny afternoons. The Guardian described the lyrics as pop-haiku explorations of everyday strangeness. Bulled and Lobban produced the whole thing themselves, and the title track got its own video.

The band first put it out themselves on Bandcamp in 2013. Years later "I'd Rather Sleep" went viral, proving that a song about staying in bed can, given time, get up and go anywhere.

Also at Kops: more Kero Kero Bonito on vinyl · browse Pop

Tracklist

Listen

On Polyvinyl (cat# PRC-470), a reissue of the 2013 album.