Photo by Gil Gharbi

Artist: Oklou

Location: London, England

Buzz: Sometimes it takes a few years for an artist to piece together their craft into a place where you see it most singularly realized. Oklou, the experimental pop moniker of singer and producer Marylou Vanina Mayniel, isn’t a new name on the horizon. Her 2020 breakthrough, Galore, came six years after her first release in the 2014 EP, Avril (under the Loumar project banner, at that,) and fascinated avant popheads and experimental electronic circles. A steady string of singles since then have kept the temperature of anticipation on the rise leading up to her proper debut. choke enough, that debut full-length, doesn’t necessitate needing to know the Oklou of the past in order to understand where she is today, or — perhaps more astutely — where the French songwriter is in the future right now.

What once were songs moving through an immaculate, Roland-designed prism field of R&B-pop romance now parses those layers into both the micro and minimalist as well as the wider screen and maximalist by expanding her canvas with guitar-pop textures, lush folds of electric brass, and turning outside sounds into entrancing field recordings that present both the delicate and chaotic of life. In some ways, it deconstructs natural order, as Oklou — alongside production collaborators Danny L Harle, A. G. Cook, and Casey MQ and alternative voices bladee and underscores — magnifies the emotion behind her songs into listeners’ mood view in a way that captures the everyday in all of its significances, even if the blaring bass beats are submerged behind a head full of thoughts in its first half. When those big, endorphin-flooding moments open wide to euphoria, you know exactly how you got that hit.

Sound: The future arriving for those who always dreamed of living in a world where the synthetic chemicals of Purity Ring, PC Music, and pink pantheress built their own art-pop utopia.

Recommended: “ict”, “take my by the hand”, and “harvest sky” off her recently-released debut full-length, choke enough, and her 2020 mixtape, Galore

Oklou’s choke enough is available now on True Panther.