On choke enough, Oklou is a Future-Facing Steward of Gentle Pop

Q1 is all about setting a tone for what cultural artifacts will follow it. It’s a yearly entry point for DIY spaces, the proverbial mainstream and whatever projects can, effectively, shorten the gap between the two. In 2024, that mantle was taken up by Mk.gee’s Two Star & the Dream Police. In 2025, I’d wager it’s Oklou’s choke enough, an impressively-PC Music-adjacent, 13-track debut sweetened by impressionistic, textured electro-pop. Oklou’s ties to the London label NUXXE and her genre-agnostic approach to internet-influenced trip-hop and future-facing sophisti-pop have made her a radically lovable steward of polyphonous composition. And, all the while, she preserves an impressive amount of privacy, showing face in the context of her work instead of lingering in interview pull-quotes or zeitgeist-clutching self-promotion. Swedish rapper Bladee is similar in that regard, and he shows up on “take me by the hand,” mumbling through digitized vocal mutations and effortlessly blending the motif of his own Drain Gang patois into Oklou’s.

But what we do know about Oklou, the “OK, Lou”-pronounced mononym of Poitiers-born musician Marylou Mayniel, is that she grew up classically trained in piano and cello. She was a choir kid. But at home, her interests were less academic; she listened to, at the behest of her brother, Dälek, Agoria and Gorillaz. She told Dazed that Massive Attack offered influence, too. I’d bet Oklou’s hard-drive is full of Frou Frou (I mean, just look at that album cover!) and Mort Garson references. She’s been traipsing around Paris for the better part of 10 years, first making a fuss with an EP called Avril, released under the moniker Loumar in 2014. In 2015, she turned towards the Oklou stage name for the first time on a self-released EP, First Tape. She, Miley Serious, DJ Ouai and Carin Kelly co-founded the female DJ collective TGAF (These Girls Are on Fiyah) and took up a residency doing weekly shows on the French electronic station PIIAF. While TGAF disbanded in 2018, it’s obvious that Mayniel found a knack for curation in the company of her counterparts.

Since First Tape, Oklou has found community with like-minded artists such as Sega Bodega, Coucou Chloe and Bok Bok, among other fixtures in the European club scene. And while she never scales the same heights or volumes as someone like Shygirl, the prize in Oklou’s catalog, her first mixtape Galore—which she put out in September 2020—sequenced collabs with GRADES, Zero and EASYFUN into tapestries of her own heady, plucky and looping eloquence. “god’s chariots” was a standout four years ago, as were “fall” and “rosebud,” tracks without capitalization but full of blissful, complicated instrumentals that never fell off-balance, all of which helped turn Mayniel into something of an underground best-kept-secret. Her command on pop’s idiom further tightened thanks to her remixes of Dua Lipa’s “Fever” and Caroline Polachek’s “Door,” but the strain of sublime she operates out of on choke enough is the kind of avant-gardism Erika de Casier and ML Buch fans have recently been salivating over. Hell, she’s only a few seconds of chaos away from summoning the uptempo charms of Hyd or Planet 1999, and the underscores-accompanying “harvest sky” nearly gets there.