Choke Enough OKLOU

"choke enough is a very intense album for me. It’s filled with directions, tentatives and irregularities, reflecting my last years on this planet as my heart and conscience has really decentered from myself”, says Marylou Mayniel, aka Oklou. "Each song calls for a different path, trying to guess which one to follow. Probably as some sort of quest for sense and purpose, in these times where the obsession with self development and self achievement is something I relate with less and less".

After establishing herself as one of the most promising artists of her generation, collaborating with names like Mura Masa, Pomme and Flavien Berger, and remixing stars including Dua Lipa and Angèle (Fever), Caroline Polachek (Door) and A.G. Cook (Being Harsh), the French artist took the time to reflect on both her career and her desires, and the result is choke enough.

The album maps an emotional landscape. Warm, beautiful productions that are the signature of the Oklou style are throughout; pairing ambient sounds with minimal club rhythms, delicate synthesizer arpeggios and found sound samples. The album’s title track, ‘choke enough’, is an embodiment of the project’s quest for meaning, of the need to be touched by anything; a grandiose epiphany or a passing quotidien moment.

“It’s the first song of the project,” explains Mayniel. “I remember listening to it in my car in Los Angeles on one of those immense roads that goes around the city. I parked in a slightly dark corner, a sort of vacant lot, and the words came suddenly, like a surge. A need to tell my story of my pursuit of intense emotions.”

This relationship with elusive, imperceptible, ephemeral emotions is the key to the album. It is a reflection on the subconscious and conscious demands of an artistic psychology, and on the demands of existing and creating in a brief and transient life.

“I see it as built on a permanent conversation between a life anchored in reality and another in fantasy”, she says. Indeed, Mayniel says first single ‘family and friends’ is “searching for answers to unstated questions, escaping from something intangible, invisible. A memory? Maybe I like the idea that I’d be running away from something, and I’m looking for good reasons to run .”

Oklou is part of the generation of artists born on the Internet, whose virtual identity is inseparable from their creative journey. After classical training in regional France, learning the piano and cello, it was her computer that introduced her to the world of electronic music. After two EPs, 2017’s For The Beasts and 2018’s The Rite Of May, Mayniel received international acclaim, accelerated through collaborations with Mura Masa, A. G. Cook and EASYFUN (the last two both producers of Charli xcx’s Brat) and culminating in her full length mixtape galore in 2020. It was a turning point in her artistic life, and heralded as an innovative and introspective work by fans and media. International touring followed, including support tours with Oneohtrix Point Never and Caroline Polachek.

If galore was born from an "emotional bubble", as Mayniel suggests, choke enough, her first album, is in every way its opposite. "This album is less about me, and more about the things I've been able to observe" she comments. Developed with co-producers Casey MQ, Danny L Harle and A. G. Cook, and featuring artists Bladee (‘take me by the hand’) and underscores (‘harvest sky’) the result is a crystallization of her artistic and personal evolution. “I can’t imagine a life without daydreaming, without spending time appreciating beauty, but I need to be anchored to the ground to continue paying attention to what’s happening around me,” Mayniel says. With choke enough, she places herself at the perfect balance between reality and imagination. “Are you human? Are you even alive?”, she asks in ‘family and friends’, as if in an ultimate quest for truth.