Time N Place: A Five Year Retrospective
A mature and sombre examination of the tribulations of youth and the anxiety of being stuck in a transitional phase, Time N Place stands in direct contrast to Bonito Generation.
Yum Adnan
Growing up is an undeniably terrifying experience. With the post-pandemic cost of living crisis in full throttle, coming of age in the 2020s is nothing short of an existential horror. Yet, all the commonly held beliefs of coming-of-age in our contemporary popular culture seem to hinge on the idea that we will grow into adulthood and find closure. There are no after-credit scenes in teen movies where characters lie comatose on their bed, grieving the childhood they’ve left behind and struggling with edging closer and closer to adulthood.
Existential malaise is a theme all too familiar to the English indie pop sensation, Kero Kero Bonito—a band well-known for their unique sound and a zest for experimentation. With the five-year anniversary of their third studio album approaching in October, perhaps it’s time to examine how this album has held up over the past five years.
Released in 2018, Time N Place ushers a completely new sound to the Kero Kero Bonito universe. With the cable noises that welcome us in the first few seconds of the record, KKB establishes Time N Place as an album that doesn’t shy away from blurring analog and digital sounds, experimenting with hardware to create a distinct, textural layer to the music. Unlike their synth J-Pop album Bonito Generation, Time N Place mixes noisy pop with punk elements and dips its toes into twee pop, synthpop, and noise rock.
A mature and sombre examination of the tribulations of youth and the anxiety of being stuck in a transitional phase, Time N Place stands in direct contrast to Bonito Generation. With their jarring, experimental production, there is a darkness that undercurrents the album—a feeling of unease created by their production choices. A notable highlight is the song, Time Today, where the recurring blips used in the song were inspired by the sounds of hospital equipment such as heart rate monitors. As a result, the bittersweet melody about having a lot of “time today” gains a horrifying depth.
What makes the album timeless, in lieu of all great music, is its ability to hone in on universal human experiences and succinctly express them within a span of three minutes. The songs on Time N Place tackle a lot of loss and grief, feelings that are familiar to the band members. During the album's production, the band's frontwoman, Sarah Bonito, experienced a great deal of personal loss, such as the demolition of her childhood home in Japan and the death of her beloved pet parakeet. Many of these personal struggles translated to songwriting, with “Flyway” dedicated to Sarah’s pet bird. Yet, despite its inherent melancholy, the album remains hopeful and focuses on one’s ability to persevere, despite it all.
The themes explored in the album are more prevalent than ever. Their single, "Only Acting", is a glitchy song that explores the expectation to perform a caricature of who you are for entertainment. While Kero Kero Bonito was expressing the exhaustion that comes with the expectation of following a singular "brand", this sentiment goes beyond musicians as internet creators burn themselves, expected to perform in perpetuity to monetise themselves. As Jia Tolentino says in her book Trick Mirror,
“Online, your audience can keep expanding forever and the performance never has to end.”
Even though the album is five years old, it eerily reflects our day to day experiences with current internet trends. Our days are characterised by micro personality "-core" aesthetics that people are expected to perform for a month, only to be discarded for another.
In addition, the album's music videos and visuals were ahead of the curve. In the Time Today video, the band incorporates glitchy VHS effects with home video footage of Sarah wistfully staring at the camera. The homebrewed production evokes a melancholic nostalgia that captures the album's spirit. We see this same feeling captured in the resurgence of the camcorder. There has been, among the youth, a yearning for simpler times in our hyper-commodified era where technology can filter your every pore while the world at large falls apart around us. KKB's videos, with all their “imperfections”, feel like a subversion of this larger trend in pop culture, an attempt to capture authenticity in the face of capitalist excess.
Since Time N Place, their music has become even more ambitious, evidently seen with their apocalyptic follow-up album “Civilisation”. During their interview with music critic Anthony Fantano, they explained that while Time N Place and Civilisation incorporated the same hardware-based production, thematically, they decided to take a large-scale, darker turn. Time N Place explores the past, present, and future on a personal scale, while Civilisation took these concepts and expanded them to the “furthest reaches of humanity”. It is a deep dive into humanity’s origins, the present day and the final days of humanity, incorporating heavier themes of war, destruction and the environment. Their edgier style seeped into their personal ventures with Sarah Bonito’s new industrial, glitchy EP Cryalot.
Ultimately, Kero Kero Bonito is a band that refuses to be pinned down. From their humble, catchy beginnings from Intro Bonito' to their expansive record Civilisation —they refuse to be defined by any genre. The band explained that while Intro Bonito, in many ways, subtly foreshadows their many eras to come and they expect to go in many more unpredictable, exciting directions in the future. And this is what ultimately makes Kero Kero Bonito one of this decade's most exciting indie pop bands.
Yumnu (Yum) Adnan is a writer and media student based in Malaysia. When she's not busy trying to meet deadlines, she can be found lurking on her Instagram (@ymmadn).
