In the southwest of France, the summer air feels thick enough to swim in. The countryside surrounding Pau—a serene city at the foothills of the Pyrenees—is golden and heavy, dotted with ponds and distant farmhouses. The heat lingers long after sunset, wrapping the world in a shimmering quiet. Here, in a borrowed house with the shutters drawn tight against the sun, Marylou Mayniel, the French musician and producer known as Oklou, is living two lives at once.
On one side, she’s a new mother. Her son Zakaria was born in May, and the rhythm of her days has shifted around his naps and feedings. On the other, she’s a rising star of European pop—fresh from the success of her debut album, choke enough, and preparing the release of a deluxe edition that will carry her music even further.
“It’s a big change,” she says softly. “But it’s calm, and I’m grateful. I thought it would be more chaotic, but it feels sweet—really soft.”
That word, soft, comes up often when Mayniel talks. Softness is her aesthetic and her philosophy: a counterpoint to the noise of modern culture, a way of carving out space for honesty, intimacy, and imperfection.
Between the Studio and the Cradle
At 32, Oklou has arrived at an intersection few artists experience so vividly: new motherhood coinciding with creative breakthrough. choke enough, her first full-length album, landed earlier this year to widespread critical acclaim. It’s an album of shimmering precision—electronic yet deeply human, emotional yet restrained.
When Mayniel publicly announced her pregnancy in February, it was the same day the album was released. “Even without being pregnant,” she laughs, “that’s the amount of promotion I wanted to do anyway.”
Her decision to protect her time—both as an artist and as a new mother—has become part of her appeal. “You can feel that her work isn’t rushed,” says Dean Bein, co-founder of True Panther Records, which released the album in the U.S. “She doesn’t chase trends. She builds worlds.”
And those worlds are quietly expanding. True Panther reports that every listener who finds choke enough tends to replay it in full. “That’s rare,” Bein says. “It means they aren’t skipping songs—they’re living inside the album.”
A Digital Garden of Emotion
Describing choke enough is like describing a mirage. It’s electronic pop that feels alive, rippling with organic warmth. Mayniel’s vocals drift between whisper and prayer, entwined with glitchy percussion and fluid synths. The production is precise but emotional—every tone feels like a breath.
Its title, choke enough, encapsulates dual meanings: to choke up, to hold back, to feel too much. “It’s about the moments when emotion and fear collide,” Mayniel says. “When you’re becoming something new, and you don’t know if you’re ready.”
That uncertainty—transformed into melody—is what sets Oklou apart from her peers. In a landscape saturated with ironic hyperpop and algorithmic beats, her music feels sincere, handcrafted, and quietly spiritual. It doesn’t demand attention; it invites you in.
“I always try to find tenderness,” she says. “Even if the beat is strong, there needs to be something soft underneath. Something round and human.”
The Craft of Softness
Softness, however, does not mean simplicity. Mayniel’s path to this sound has been long and disciplined. She began studying classical piano and cello as a child in Poitiers, western France. Her parents were amateur musicians—her mother a lover of French chanson, her father a harmonica player. Music filled their home.
At the conservatory, Mayniel learned to read scores, analyze harmony, and rehearse rigorously. But she also began to rebel. “I loved classical music, but I didn’t see myself in that world,” she says. “I wanted to make something that could breathe.”
By her early twenties, she was uploading experimental tracks under pseudonyms like Avril Alvarez and Loumar, exploring the edges of electronic pop. Moving to Paris, she joined a women-led DJ collective called These Girls Are on Fiyah and began shaping her alter ego: Oklou.
Her early EPs—For the Beasts (2015) and The Rite of May (2018)—introduced a distinct sonic palette: melancholy synths, watery melodies, and a ghostly intimacy that would later define her style.
In 2020, during lockdown, she released Galore, a mixtape of heartbreak and transformation that caught the attention of international producers like Danny L Harle and A.G. Cook. It was Harle who encouraged her to dig deeper into her own instincts. “She basically does what I do, but better,” he says, half-jokingly. “There’s something fearless in her softness.”
Building a World: The Making of choke enough
The recording process for choke enough stretched over several years, moving between Paris, Los Angeles, and the French coast. One of her closest collaborators was Casey MQ, a Toronto-born producer and multi-instrumentalist known for his lush emotional pop.
“We can spend a whole day writing by a pool,” Casey says. “She’s slow and deliberate. Every sound matters.”
Mayniel agrees: “When I start a song, I don’t think of chords first. I think of the texture. The sound tells me what notes to play.”
Her method is almost sculptural—building songs from fragments, loops, and found sounds. The opening of choke enough begins with a distorted heartbeat, nearly unrecognizable as a drum. “We both have a complicated relationship with drums,” Harle adds. “If they’re there, they need to mean something.”
For Oklou, meaning comes from intuition. She rejects formulas and deadlines. “To finish a record, I had to reach a kind of loneliness,” she says. “A space where I could hear myself clearly.”
Motherhood and Music: A Dual Awakening
When Zakaria was born, Mayniel’s creative perspective shifted. “I thought motherhood would be overwhelming,” she admits. “But it made everything quieter inside me.”
The calm she describes isn’t detachment—it’s focus. “Now, when I work, I don’t waste time on fear,” she says. “I don’t second-guess as much.”
Her partner, Gil Gharbi, a photographer and part-time shepherd, captured the album’s artwork and directed several of its videos. His presence, she says, allows her to balance domestic life and artistry. “He understands the rhythm of creation. We both like silence.”
Oklou’s house in Pau has become both nursery and studio. Between feedings, she revisits tracks for the choke enough deluxe edition, due this autumn. Among the new additions is “viscus,” a collaboration with FKA twigs finished during her maternity leave. The song pulses with fragile power—a conversation between two women navigating transformation.
The Tenderness of Animation and Memory
When Oklou talks about her music, she often compares it to film. She dreams of composing soundtracks for animated movies, the kind that blend melancholy with magic. “I think my songs could be for children,” she says. “Not because they’re simple, but because they’re full of stories.”
She plans to raise her son surrounded by art. “Every Sunday, we’ll watch a classic animation—Miyazaki, maybe The Rescuers, or The Black Cauldron,” she says. “Stories about animals and kindness. Things that show you the world is strange but beautiful.”
Her love of animation threads through her music, too. “I want my songs to feel like they have light moving through them,” she says. “Like a small world inside a bigger one.”
That sentiment reaches its peak on “blade bird,” the final track of choke enough, inspired by a Basque poem, Txoria Txori (“The Bird’s a Bird”). “It’s about loving someone because they’re free—even if you can’t keep them,” she explains. “That felt like the right note to end on.”
The Internet and the Idea of Permanence
Oklou’s music might sound born of the digital age, but she’s growing disenchanted with it. She used to live on SoundCloud and Tumblr, part of a generation of artists who built communities online. “Now,” she says, “I’m bored. I don’t know how to use it anymore.”
She laughs, but the sentiment is real. “Maybe that’s why choke enough feels so human—it’s online music that’s looking for the ground.”
Unlike many artists who scrub their early work, she’s kept her old tracks and aliases visible. “It’s part of my story,” she says. “Some of it is bad, but that’s okay. It’s a process. I’m not ashamed.”
Her attachment to imperfection, to leaving traces behind, feels radical in an age obsessed with curation. It’s the same energy that animates her motherhood: patience, acceptance, and continuity.
The Deluxe Future and Beyond
The upcoming choke enough (Deluxe) doesn’t mark an endpoint, but a bridge. It includes reworked versions of early songs like “what’s good” and new collaborations that stretch her sound toward cinematic pop and ambient storytelling.
She hints that her next project might break with expectation entirely. “Maybe less pop,” she says. “More instrumental. I’d like to annoy the industry a little.”
That quiet rebellion is quintessential Oklou: graceful but uncompromising. “She’s not chasing virality,” says Bein. “She’s building a legacy.”
Oklou’s Place in Modern Pop
To understand why Oklou resonates so deeply with a growing global audience, it helps to look at her context. She’s part of a wave of European artists—alongside Caroline Polachek, Sevdaliza, Arca, and Shygirl—who are reshaping what pop can sound like.
But while many of her contemporaries lean into avant-garde spectacle, Oklou’s rebellion is subtler. Her power lies in restraint—in making digital sound emotional, in making motherhood feel modern, in being vulnerable without spectacle.
Her songs unfold slowly, like emotional architecture. You can’t skip through them; they demand immersion. “She’s building worlds where feeling is the technology,” says producer Danny L Harle.
In that sense, Oklou’s choke enough feels like a manifesto for a new kind of pop: quietly radical, emotionally literate, and deeply feminine.
Endless Summer
A week after our conversation in Pau, the heat finally breaks. When I call back, Mayniel is home, Zakaria asleep in her arms. The shutters are open, the light gentle and gold.
“I think I’m done chasing things,” she says. “The world feels very loud, but I want my life to feel soft. If the music can do that for other people—make them breathe a little slower—that’s enough.”
She pauses. The baby stirs, then settles.
In a world that rewards volume, Oklou’s quiet may be her loudest statement yet.
Editor’s Pick: Kendall Jenner Revives Early 2000s Layering Trend With a Chic Skant Look in Paris
Related Read: Porsha Williams Opens Up About Dating Men and Women After Divorce: “He Is Nice and She Is Nice”
