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.

Oklou’s debut album comes with ideas aplenty. There are field recordings of busyness, snippets of Korg Wavestation warps, woodwinds and brass interlocked with ambient interstices. “obvious” side-chains snare-drum programming and bit-crushed caroling into the coiling buzz of a watery synth; “endless” brightens when Oklou’s post-vaporwave electronics soothe rather than zig-zag. On “forces,” she pulls breakbeats out of clippings of insect-like synths and drone strata, and a song like “plague dogs” stacks whispers on top of vocal runs, distorted, octave-surfing platitudes and angel-tinted falsettos, as if there are 20 voices trying to get a word in, yet all of them collide generously into one legible dialect.

Oklou’s conservatory roots flare up on songs like “ict” and “obvious,” but I wouldn’t dare say that choke enough resembles the pockets to which Handel, Telemann, Wagner and Mendelssohn often fell into with their symphonies. That would be ludicrous. Mayniel is far less individualistic than that, and she certainly appears to have no interest in splicing overwrought bombast into the even-tempered DNA of her own songcraft. But, what she does well is serve her music with nostalgia, desire and distance. You can hear the air slipping past every note she and her producers, A.G. Cook, Danny L Harle and Casey MQ, play. The kind of intentionality she practices, all the way down to the 808s on “blade bird,” or the Auto-Tuned strangeness of “want to wanna come back,” is worth remembering and reacting to, even if the songs aren’t as club ready as those of her contemporaries. So much of choke enough is visceral and internet-honored, especially during a track like “thank you for recording,” which sounds like Oklou photoshopped her vocals out of a hyper-pop PNG file and slipped them into an underwater synth melody.

Often, choke enough beckons like a cyber trance, pairing quiet, Eurodance crescendos with digital stillness. It’s emotional, gentle and anything but angular, and Oklou’s abstractions feel kindred to music theory yet acutely distrusting of persona and its all-consuming perils. Looking at the pop music that has defined 2025’s early rattles, choke enough is far more in conversation with experimental, salt-of-the-earth titles like Saya Gray’s SAYA and Ela Minus’ DÍA than Tate McRae’s So Close to What, or Rose Gray’s Louder, Please; its songs are sonorous, versatile and aim for intimacy rather than branding, cliché and casualness. Lyrically, Oklou cryptically gestures towards neo-pagan rituals, grief’s entrapments, the detriments of self-obsession, perception and recognizable irony. But her turns of phrase are just one language in choke enough’s tabula rasa of tone poetry.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.