The Aquitaine countryside unfolds in a collage of khaki, tan, and green, dotted with little ponds and copses of trees. The land starts to fall away, turning greener as we fly toward a valley. The French would’ve taken the train here, but then they wouldn’t have seen the towering cloud banks recede, revealing solid rock: the Pyrenees.
Below, in the rustic stone-brick city of Pau, the musician and producer Marylou Mayniel meets me outside a restaurant and leads us around the corner to the local cinema bar. In a sense, we’re recreating one of the rare date nights she and her partner, the photographer and part-time shepherd Gil Gharbi, have enjoyed since bringing their new baby to stay with his family here for the summer (they saw Eddington—she called it an “interesting modern Western but a bit confusing on its satirical aspects”). For the most part lately, they’ve been in the house, living in semidarkness, keeping the shutters closed to give the A/C a chance. It was 103 degrees Fahrenheit yesterday, 104 today—40 degrees Celsius—the hottest, Mayniel says, that she can remember it ever being in France.
It’s early evening, still hot, and the shopping district is quiet. August is the summer holiday season. Here in Pau, the sun doesn’t go down until after nine. We’re drinking cool neon citronnade in wavy glasses.
“If I ever cradle my belly/Stepping into the fantasy/Will I wanna go back?” Mayniel sings in “family and friends,” an early single from her acclaimed debut as Oklou, this year’s choke enough. Against a palette of softly glitching synth, Zelda flute, and twittering mechanical birds, the song circles feelings of uncertainty about commitment, sacrifice, and choosing one’s true path. Then the image she’d written about came true: Mayniel, 32, welcomed her first child, her son, Zakaria, in May.
She’d long wanted to be a mother, and she’s loving it. “Some new parents can feel a lack of freedom and a bit, how do you say, out of breath. But I don’t, and I’m really grateful for that,” she says. “In a good way, it’s way more emotionally quiet, calm, than what I thought it would be. It’s a big change of life, but emotionally I feel really calm. And I love him, obviously, very much, and I’m so glad. But it’s very sweet, it’s soft.”
It is a sweet time to be Oklou. Mayniel publicly announced her pregnancy in February, the same day she released choke enough, a slow-burning success that will get a deluxe edition at the end of October. That’s a stacked schedule, but if she had to pass up a few opportunities to promote the record, she says, so be it: “Even without being pregnant, that’s the amount of things that I was willing to do, you know?”
The deluxe edition will give choke enough a nudge with audiences for tour dates this fall, but Oklou fans don’t need much encouragement. “A few months into the album being out, I think the monthly listeners was like a million maybe, which is nothing to shake a stick at,” says Dean Bein, cofounder of True Panther, Mayniel’s label in the US, who’s calling from a park in Buenos Aires. “But the plays per listener were 11. So that means that every one of those listeners, they listened to basically the entire album.” This is the kind of concentrated attention that gives rise to cultishly devoted fan bases. A red-carpet clip where Ayo Edebiri shouted out choke enough’s title track convinced Oklou fans that The Bear star is gagged too. Major labels have pitched offers and French media is catching up: “Oklou, the global star that France didn’t see coming” goes the headline of a recent deep dive from Le Point magazine.
Why are the internet’s pop fans so obsessed? Oklou’s music is often described as “digital” and “ethereal,” but I think we can do better. choke enough is an enchanted forest of haptic feedback, a mirror where we observe Mayniel’s character confronting the dilemmas that await her on the road to destiny. “Far away is closer than it sounds,” she counsels in the opening song, deploying one of the unusual poetic constructions common in her lyrics: “Is the endless still unbound / Or am I just different now?” choke enough is about decisions and possibilities, about windows that can open but also close. To choke up (cry), to choke off (throttle), to fucking choke (Mom’s spaghetti): a frisson of danger to reflect just how nerve-racking these life-changing moments can feel, even when you know they’re coming for you anyway.
Mayniel has been working toward this moment for more than 10 years. As a conservatory student, though, she never imagined becoming a composer or a frontwoman; she pictured herself one day as a session musician or maybe a music teacher. She used to work summers at a kids’ music camp. She doesn’t cast the famous-person force field, the one that announces, Someone has arrived; her charisma runs cooler. Wearing tennis shoes, satin shorts, and a pink camisole over a baby blue nursing bra, she looks much like any new mom running a summer errand. Sealed under the back of her clear plastic phone case is a wallet-size photo of her son.
Naturally, she’s missed some sleep, and occasionally she struggles to remember precisely the word she wants in English or French. She hasn’t yet had time to explore Pau, a regional hub known for its sporting arenas, its medieval castle, and a scenic promenade that’s a permanent stop on the Tour de France course. She grew up in the small western city of Poitiers, and now spends most of her time in Seine-Saint-Denis, a vibrant suburb north of Paris. But she’d like to live somewhere more like this one day: in provincial France, closer to family, perhaps even in the countryside.
“There was a time when it was on the table for me to actually move to the US, but I think I love too much seeing my friends and my family,” she says. “Plus I love this country very much—the territory, not the state.” The right amount of Los Angeles, in Mayniel’s opinion, is a few weeks at a time: “I don’t feel like I have to do everything to maximize my chances to meet these people there. I’m just too happy in France.”
You could say she’s already met the most important person she knows in LA: the classically trained musician and producer Casey MQ, a creative partner and collaborator since 2017’s For the Beasts EP and the coproducer of nearly every track on choke enough. “We’ll sit and spend the day writing the lyrics, and then we will be on our pen and pad or we’ll be sitting by a pool,” says Casey Manierka-Quaile, over video from his house in Echo Park. Since hitting it off at a Red Bull Music Academy residency in Montreal in 2016, they’ve hosted each other for writing sessions, toured Casey’s hometown of Toronto, and hiked in the Pyrenees. They worked on choke enough mostly between Paris, LA, and a vacation rental in Cap Ferret, a beach enclave that Mayniel describes as kind of like the Hamptons of France.
I ask Mayniel if they ever have disagreements. No, she says. Never. “Casey, when he works with me…. He’s not gonna try to make me change my mind, even if he thinks that it’s better,” she says, laughing. “The importance of trusting your guts, he believes in this too. So you know, he has no claim on my guts.”
A few years ago, they booked a place in the mountains near Valencia, Spain, to record the first Oklou mixtape. Galore, released in September 2020, is a heartbreak record that looks to inspirations like Caroline Polachek and Rosalía. Its title comes from a screen name used by Mayniel’s ex-boyfriend, whom she met online. It was around Galore, and a version of the song
“fall” for the YouTube series Colors, that Mayniel’s work began turning heads in the artist-and-producer community, says Danny L Harle, who speaks to me from London. “It was, like, music, but just the good bits,” he raves of her work. “She basically, in my opinion, does what I do, but way better”—so much better, he claims, that in their first attempt at working together he just felt redundant.
Nonetheless, Harle became a collaborator and sounding board for Mayniel as she assembled choke enough. He met her in London to contribute production to four album songs and, after Mayniel took maternity leave, put the finishing touches on the splashiest of the new deluxe tracks, the FKA twigs duet “viscus.” She left him a surprise, though: “Is it called ‘viscus’?” he asks, with comically Sherlockian astonishment—I’m the first to tell him the title of the song. (Additional album contributors include Harle’s PC Music associate A. G. Cook, responsible for those puffs of hydraulic percussion on “thank you for recording”; songwriter Nate Campany; and Canadian art-pop singer Cecile Believe. Gharbi, Mayniel’s partner, shot the album cover and directed videos for “obvious” and “family and friends.”)
“When I work on things, I’m interested in the tenderness,” Mayniel says. We’ve circled from the cinema patio back to the restaurant, a cozy wood-paneled vegetarian bistro, where we’re having the fried polenta and fennel in mushroom sauce. “Even when I’m working with more punchy elements, I always need to find some sort of softness. Softness in the sound, something very round and dark.
“I guess I would like to create a sonic universe that is kid-friendly,” she goes on. “This is not conscious—I just noticed that it could be the soundtrack of the life of a little kid…because I like the melodies. A bit of storytelling in the music, without talking about lyrics or vocals. Just the production needs to tell you something, just like a soundtrack of an animation movie.”
Classic animation for children and adults is one of Mayniel’s passions, especially stories with animal heroes. She hopes to wait “as late as possible” before handing her child a screen, but she’s planning one exception: Once a week, on Sundays, she’ll gather the family to watch a classic animated film—something by Miyazaki, or one of the less-celebrated Disney features, like The Rescuers (1977) or The Black Cauldron (1985), known to French children as Taram et le Chaudron Magique. A darker, more grown-up favorite is The Plague Dogs (1982), the story of escaped animal test subjects based on a book by Watership Down author Richard Adams, which lends its title to a song from choke enough.
Harle read Watership Down recently, and he, too, studied classical music, but his and Mayniel’s favorite point of reference is a little younger. “We shared the same love for the Lion King music feeling,” she explains. Per Harle, it’s epitomized in the scene where Simba sees the reflection of his father’s face, as well as in the theme music of the 1990 Lucasfilm adventure game The Secret of Monkey Island. “I feel like there’s a part of every adult,” he says, “where, if you are given just a kernel of that feeling again, but in a genuine way, you burst into tears.”
Growing up, Mayniel credits her parents for making music part of the fabric of family life. “My mom, she would play a lot of classical music and also a bit of [quintessentially] French pop music, you know, with nice lyrics and nice instrumentation, simple, like guitar, piano,” she says. “Both of them were really into traditional music and dance, so it was Irish music all the time, and a lot of traditional music with accordions and violins.” Her dad used to like to play his harmonica while driving.
Mayniel and her elder brother, Clovis, each played piano from a young age; she remembers hearing him practice while she played Barbies, and going to her first lessons at a local music teacher’s home. “She used to have animals in the garden,” she says. Later, she studied cello and piano at conservatory school, and taught herself to play her brother’s guitar with tab sheets printed from the internet. (The siblings also have two older half-sisters.) As a teenager in Poitiers, Mayniel gravitated to Le Confort Moderne, part of a network of government-supported cultural venues called SMAC (scène de musiques actuelles), where she met like-minded friends and saw touring bands perform—memorably, the obliteratingly loud Sunn O))).
Around 2013 she began recording and uploading music of her own, much of which remains online: a beat tape, Avril, and assorted features on chill-out house tracks credited to her old alias, Loumar; a SoundCloud account under Avril Alvarez, a pseudonym based on her birth month, April. In 2014 she moved to Paris, where she became a founding member of a women’s DJ crew, These Girls Are on Fiyah. This is the period when the Oklou discography properly begins, with For the Beasts, and a second EP, The Rite of May, released in 2018, during what became a two-year stay in London, where Mayniel collaborated with the artist Malibu, along with NUXXE collective cofounders Sega Bodega and Shygirl.
A lot of artists in her position, I point out, would’ve wiped their early 2010s internet presence by now. “I just love archives,” she replies. “And I could put it private, but….” She trails off to reflect. “I don’t see why I should take it [down]. Some of it is not good, but it’s normal. It’s part of the process. I’m not ashamed of it.” The matter-of-fact rebuff feels very French, very Oklou.
As carefully considered as her music is, Mayniel can be disarmingly unprecious about it. “I’m gonna be really honest with you, but I haven’t really thought that much—’cause I couldn’t—about the whole story of the deluxe edition,” she says. She had a baby to think about. “viscus” is the only bonus track to originate from the choke enough era, while three others revisit earlier material. “what’s good” is an old song, circa Galore, that Mayniel loved enough to rework (its prior form lives on Avril Alvarez’s SoundCloud). “The fishsong unplugged” is an acoustic cover from her live set, Mayniel’s take on the surreal but real story of a doomed fish by Underscores, a.k.a. April Harper Grey, who’s featured on the album single “harvest sky.” Another restoration is “dance 2,” a clubby skyscraper Mayniel first started to work on in 2018.
When she’s ready, she says, she’ll make a new album: maybe less pop, more instrumental. “J’aimerais bien essayer de faire chier un peu l’industrie, justement,” she confides. She’d have fun pissing them off.
Unlike Galore, much of which can be played on piano—the song “rosebud” is “literally like a Bach style”—Mayniel perceives choke enough as being synthetic. She rooted her concept of each track in the sonorities of a particular synth chord. “The sound I used to start the creation is gonna tell me which notes I should play, you know?” she explains. “When I play from a guitar or piano, the sound is really always the same, and it’s a great sound, but I’m interested in the texture of sounds that I cannot just stick to.”
She also reoriented her production style around loops, editing and resurfacing sounds and rhythms culled from her files, from Casey’s files, and from professional beat packs until nearly every song developed its own collection of character motifs. The first sound on the album is a lonely, irregular pulse, like a line of Morse code: a drum pattern that she filtered almost beyond recognition. “Me and her both have a similar kind of relationship to drums,” explains Harle, “which is like, we’d prefer them to not be there, but if they have to be there, they might as well have a note in them.” (He hints they have a heap of unreleased work together, including one new song coming soon.)
Mayniel’s favorite choke enough song, coproduced with Casey MQ and another friend, French DJ Lucien Krampf, is the title track. She landed on the word choke, she explains, in the same way as many of her lyrics, which she writes in English: based on the gibberish syllables she invents to model melodies on demos. The rest of the song was harder, because its muted hybrid of pop and electronic conventions doesn’t build up or drop; instead it scrolls by, like a video game background. “I struggled a lot making my point” with the production, she says. “I knew that I didn’t want to take that path of like, club music, but also without saying too much, I was kind of being pressured by people I worked with, being like, Oh, you should…. I was questioning my intuition: Oh, maybe I’m wasting the potential of the track. And so it took me years before I finally felt confident enough to be like, No, I should just follow my gut.”
True Panther’s Bein recalls a point about a year and a half into the recording process, when, conscious of passing time, he asked Mayniel how the label could help her get the songs finished. “She said, ‘You know, for me, in order to finish this, I have to reach a level of loneliness that is really difficult for me to summon, and I don’t actually know when it is that I’m gonna summon it,’ ” he recalls. The album took another year, but Mayniel tells me later that she’s not sure she found true loneliness; eventually, she just had to call it.
Part of why choke enough feels so uncannily familiar, I believe, is that it succeeds at bringing real-life existentialism into the paradoxical condition of feeling permanently online. “Obsessed with living in the present,” Underscores mutters on “harvest sky,” a song inspired by Mayniel’s memories of bonfire celebrations for la Fête de la Saint-Jean, the feast of Saint John the Baptist, which traditionally falls around the summer solstice. What else but the loop, the complete cycle, the refresh, to take us back to ourselves?
Yet if you don’t know what to look for, each song is a sleek, self-contained whole; like Apple used to boast of its tech products, “it just works,” straight out of the box. Months later, I’m still unlocking new features: foggy background samples, pregnant pauses, birdlike screeches that underline the drama of the moment, in much the same way, I notice, as the birds in The Plague Dogs, the film.
These birds were never real, though. The keening tone heard on an interlude, and again on “forces,” is man-made, some kind of equipment that Mayniel recorded in her neighborhood. And “blade bird,” choke enough’s elegiac, acoustic closer, adapts the concept of a Basque-language poem and folk song, “Txoria Txori” (“The Bird’s a Bird”), which laments a love that cannot be possessed. Mayniel first encountered the poem in a novel, Les Gens de Bilbao Naissent Où Ils Veulent, by Spanish writer and filmmaker María Larrea. “When I read the translation, it really resonated a lot with me, and I guess with the history of my parents,” she says.
“I thought it was beautifully placed, that feeling of falling in love with people because they’re beautiful, because they’re so free, but then they’re so free that you can’t have them, really.” At first I pictured a little bird pierced by a dagger, like a traditional tattoo, but months later, I pictured a bird made of blades, wings cycling like the thin, muscular arms of a wind turbine—a loop.
In the back rooms of the internet there used to be all kinds of amateur splendor: hand-curated YouTube music channels, niche Tumblr art archives, strangers’ Flickr galleries, pseudonymous SoundClouds. The underground pop of the 2010s used to get so excited about being online, using shrinky-dink artifice to delight in poking fun at a culture that could feel shallow and strange but also organic and endlessly renewable. Turns out the internet isn’t really forever. Mayniel spends less time on all forms of social media these days: “I’m bored. I don’t know how to use it anymore.” Touch grass, they say: choke enough is an online album looking for the ground.
The ground looks a little different under each of us. A week later, I call Mayniel back to check some details and get a glimpse of hers: Home in a comfy chair, holding baby Zakaria, who’s nursing while Mayniel talks. The heat wave’s finally broken, and the sun’s shining in.
PRODUCTION CREDITS
Photographs by Steph Wilson
Hair and Makeup by Kevyn Charo Using Givenchy
Special Thanks to Pierre Demones, Personal Stylist to Oklou