At a glance, Kero Kero Bonito might not seem like the deepest act in modern pop music, the English three-piece crafting songs that are heavy on toy-store keyboards, too-cute-for-school vocals, and relentlessly upbeat lyrics.

But spend 45 minutes on the phone with singer Sarah Midori Perry and programmer Gus Lobban and you quickly realize that the London-based act not only has insightful opinions, but is capable of eloquently voicing them, both verbally and artistically, in a way that’s cleverly subversive.

Take the songs on Kero Kero Bonito’s debut, Bonito Generation. That most of them fall under the banner of “blazingly adorable”, for example, can be seen either as buying into millennial positivity or, if one prefers, how the English music landscape is currently ruled by the dour likes of the xx. That Perry flits effortlessly between Japanese and English when she sings is a valid statement on how the world’s various cultures have never been more intertwined.

Before the Internet became what it is today, you had to camp out in the import section of Zulu to find a copy of the Zoobombs’ Super Funcy of Zbons, or head to Videomatica to source the Japanese version of The Ring. Now it’s all there with the click of a mouse. And that’s exactly how Lobban and the third member of Kero Kero Bonito, programmer Jamie Bulled, discovered J-pop, which features prominently in the band’s sound.

“I think this whole generation of mine had an exposure to Japanese consumer culture that was sort of totally unprecedented,” Lobban says, speaking alongside Perry on a conference call from London, England. “There was this globalization that rose up with digital media and so on. And because the Japanese economy was booming just before that, we bore the full brunt of Dragon Ball, Nintendo, Solid, and Pokémon. A lot of those things are deeply Japanese culturally, and we were exposed to those aesthetics, which actually were really different from all the things that western audiences were into before.

“So in terms of getting into Japanese pop music more deeply, it was totally because of being able to go on the Internet and go on websites like hmv.co.jp,” he continues. “That would give you a couple of threads to go on, and then it was just a matter of diving right in. I learned as much as I could, starting with people who would have had vague western connections, like Fantastic Plastic Machine. When you discover Japanese pop music as a western listener, it’s like discovering a parallel universe of pop music.”

Enamoured of that universe, Lobban and Bulled placed a classified ad for a singer familiar with J-pop, hip-hop, and EDM who was capable of singing in both English and Japanese. They got more responses than they could have dreamed, including some from senior citizens looking for new adventures. The winner was Perry, who spent the first dozen or so years of her life living in Japan with mixed-race parents, before moving to England in her teens.

“Right before we moved, the film Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone came out in Japan,” she recalls. “I remember going to see it in the cinema and thinking that the U.K. was going to be exactly like Hogwarts. Like ‘We’ll all be in our robes and in dorms.’ The transition was hard—there’s a lot of differences. The hardest thing was to learn to hug people when you say hello and goodbye. In Japan, you don’t touch anyone—you bow.”

Right from the start, the members of what would become Kero Kero Bonito had no problem bonding, with both Lobban and Perry confessing to being outsiders growing up. That’s surprising, considering how ridiculously positive they sound on Bonito Generation, with the kickoff track, “Waking Up”, even making the idea of rolling out of bed seem pleasant.

As her bandmates create a sonic backdrop that suggests they’ve got a major fetish for video-game soundtracks and ’80s analogue synths, Perry sings lines like “It’s party time/Eat your breakfast and you’ll be fine” in a voice that’s part Kate Nash and part Robyn, if she’d been born in Tokyo instead of Stockholm. And if you want mission impossible, try staying bummed through dance-floor delight “Trampoline” (sample lyric: “If we all jump together then we’ll go higher”) or the sun-blazed new-romantic update “Big City” (“I joined a band and it turned out alright”).

During the course of their chat with the Straight, the two bandmates talk passionately about everything from the early DIY brilliance of bands like Scritti Politti to the phenomenon of school bullying, and how bullies often end up tormented later on in life by their actions.

“At school I was the kid who would be super-earnest about Pokémon cards or something like that, and then all the other kids would take the mickey out of me,” Lobban remembers. “They’d pretend to be cool and detached—spend their time talking about cars and things like that. Meanwhile, I’d end up waxing lyrical about how fun my favourite game was. And you know what kids are like—they can really go all in and be harsh.”

Perry adds: “Living in Japan, I was born to be an outcast. Even looking slightly foreign or having a foreign-sounding name there automatically makes you an outcast in Japan. Anyone who is not full Japanese is not common in Japan, so you get a lot of attention.”

Funnily enough, attention is exactly what she and her bandmates are starting to get with Kero Kero Bonito—only this time in a relentlessly upbeat way.

Kero Kero Bonito plays Fortune Sound Club on Wednesday (October 12).