In Oklou’s native French, madeleine de Proust is an expression used to describe those sudden jolts of memory, triggered by a scent, a song, a taste—a sensory encounter that suddenly flings you back in time. “It’s my favourite thing to experience,” beams the Paris-based musician. “Even more than falling in love.” These unexpected flashbacks, conjuring full worlds of forgotten feelings with instantaneous, visceral clarity, are rare but powerful. One of her first, she recounts, laughing, was ‘Red Red Wine’ by UB40. “When I first heard it back, the things that I felt in my heart…! It was so so intense.” To Oklou, real name Marylou Mayniel, the magic of the madeleine lies in its ephemerality. By its very essence, it is something that cannot be chased, re-created, anticipated or even overindulged in. “You cannot invent this sensation,” she explains. “It just hits you.”
Such soft sentimentality runs through Mayniel as a person and an artist. “I’m really attached to memories. I’m a very nostalgic person,” she explains. In the past, she’s described her music as “childish”, a word which, alone, undersells the complexity of her craft: her conservatory training in cello and piano, the poetic lyricism of her songwriting, and the uncanny, esoteric undercurrent that often courses beneath its surface. Still, there is an irrefutable sense of playfulness and childlike curiosity to her music. Whimsy is a word reviewers use often. Woven with pastoral flutes, trumpet fanfares, and harp-like arpeggios, her melodies often feel as though they belong to another age: quasi-medieval, baroque, folk-tinted—recalling the otherworldly nostalgia of a Runescape quest or an enchanted fairytale. “I’m attracted to very catchy melodies,” she explains—as evidenced by the plucked synth line in ‘fall’ from her 2020 release Galore, the glowing mallet tones in ‘Samuel’ from 2018’s Rite of May, or the bright, 27-second sketch ‘ouverture en corolle,’ uploaded to YouTube a decade ago. This draw toward simple, recursive lines lies at the core of her method: she counts a deep infatuation with loops—inspired by artists like William Basinski and Palmistry, and the hypnotic patterns of Four Tet’s first outfit, Fridge—as central to her writing. “There’s a faithfulness to these kinds of melodies,” she explains. “I think it just touches me—the concept of finding the simple line that will really kick you in the heart.”
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That concept takes full form in choke enough, the 2025 album that broke through an already cult fandom to find doting new audiences choked up by Oklou’s singular imagination (Ayo Edibiri and Billie Eilish included). Originally conceived to be entirely drumless—a vision Mayniel instinctively compromised on during the creative process—the percussion on choke enough remains sparse, but its instrumentation is luminous and beaming with presence. In its delicate cascades and synths shimmering like toy xylophones, it captures the twinkle and magic of the Disney films she grew up on. All the while, rippling figures carry the rhythm and attest to Mayniel’s ambient-club roots (she came up as a DJ alongside carin kelly, Malibu, DJ Ouai, and Miley Serious). Produced together with Casey MQ and Danny L Harle, choke enough is subtle and surprising, full of delightful contradictions like—as one YouTuber points out—“crying on the dancefloor to a trumpet solo.” Fans flood her comment section with stories of feeling “saved,” “healed,” or transported to a place of safety by her music. One listener compared hearing the album to the soft wonder of childhood, and the lullaby-like feeling of being swaddled and held by a parent.
Since completing the album in September 2024, Mayniel has become a mother herself. She announced her pregnancy together with the album’s release back in February, via Instagram, where the sincere introduction to choke enough concluded with the candid: “also, I’m pregnant lol.” Baby Zakaria was born in May. There’s only one song on the album that explicitly references motherhood: ‘family and friends,’ in which she sings If I ever cradle my belly/Stepping into the fantasy/Will I wanna go back/In time/To the infinite center/In the womb of my mother? Mayniel gets asked about it often. “It’s a question, and now I can answer!” she laughs over Zoom in September, having just performed for the first time since giving birth. Comfortingly, she explains she doesn’t feel different—“in a good way! It’s just an amazing addition, which I’m very excited about.”
One of those excitements is the prospect of revisiting her own childhood world, and reliving it with him. “I’m not a ‘no-screensbefore-the-age-of-three type parent,” she laughs. “[Movies] really changed my life for the better—I’m sure of that.” Growing up in a farming town near Poitiers, France, Mayniel has fond memories of the magical worlds she saw on screen—which have influenced her music both directly and indirectly. She’s referred to ‘Little April Shower’ from Bambi as “the best music video ever made,” and the Disneyfied fawn is something of a spirit animal, recurring as a motif throughout her work—from ‘how bright you are’ (her tender, 2019 rendition of a Mikey Enwright instrumental) to the 2025 video for ‘obvious.’ The 1982 animation Plague Dogs (written by the author of Watership Down) inspired the track of the same name, and is easter-egged in that same video. “A lot of Disney movies are arguable,” she admits, “but at the end of the day, I had dreams.”
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Mayniel sings in English, often letting sounds tumble out before the words settle into sense, lending her lyrics a dreamlike quality too. Frequently blended into the production rather than pushed forward, her voice acts as an instrument in the texture: intimate, but withheld—words waiting to be deciphered with each, more attuned listen. Those words are often deceptively simple, yet pierce through with intense emotional force once appreciated. My blade is on the bird, she sings on ‘blade bird’ (2025), over a sweet, whistle-ready melody, articulating the painful ache of loving someone who can’t be pinned down; the blade sharp and dangerous, the bird light and free. On ‘friendless’ (2018), the devastating loneliness of drifting apart is shrouded in a post-dubstep pulse: I know how cold your body is/I burnt my hands on it.
On ‘collapsing’ (2015), she renders Justin Bieber’s ‘Where Are Ü Now’ as something more tender, coaxing the fragile yearning buried in its chorus. And in ‘harvest sky’ (2025), she lingers on the edges of the party, listening to its murmurs from a distance—choosing the echo over the centre, observing rather than participating. Hers is music that often hovers at the threshold, caught between closeness and remove.
I notice that tension elsewhere too: in the push-pull between cute and creepy, and the space where innocence tips over into the uncanny. “I don’t know how to trace that fascination back,” she admits, “but a very good friend of mine is an artist, and our mantra was always creepy and cute.” The seduction of strangeness is somewhat ‘childish’ too—think the entrancing but unsettling allure characteristic of children’s television—so it’s no wonder it reverberates so strongly across Oklou’s visual and sonic output. choke enough’s ‘ict’ was sparked by a YouTube rabbit hole of people obsessing over ice cream trucks. Its melody warps into something off-kilter, echoing their eerie, dissonant jingles fading down suburban streets. In the video for ‘take me by your hand,’ she appears angelic and ethereal, while clutching a rat in her hands. This tension—between the sweet and the unsettling, between lullaby and unease—runs through much of her work.
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On choke enough, that relationship is sharpened through lo-fi, CCTV-like visuals tinged with the unease of surveillance. The striking blue-toned voyeurism calls me back to the particularly poignant lyrics of 2021’s ‘nighttime,’ in which Mayniel cast herself as a shepherd gazing longingly outwards, waiting for her lost sheep to return—blue tint on the windows. That image lingers in choke enough’s world too—watchful, but somehow unsettling. The visuals were created with her partner Gil Gharbi (who also happens to be—entirely coincidentally—a real-life shepherd), folding her fascination with the uncanny into something intimate.
The video for ‘family and friends’ is perhaps her most action-packed to date, but, Mayniel reveals, was the least instinctive. “Sometimes you make music, and you have images in your head,” she explains. “I had many ideas for other songs from the album, but [for this], I didn’t specifically have anything. For me it was a song that was so evocative in itself—a lot is going on, the instrumentation is full. There’s almost too much.” Mayniel tends to avoid visuals unless they feel necessary. “But we had to figure out something for marketing purposes,” she laughs. What emerged was a jittery, breathless clip that almost feels like a scene from an indie horror film—(much like this Shelley Duvall-inspired The Shining shoot). Its speed-ramping camera work gives the uneasy sense of running from something unseen, the lens itself part of the action, as though the viewer might be holding it.
And their collaboration is clearly resonating. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a music video be so instructive in how to appreciate a song’s musicality,” reads one of the comments on ‘obvious’, which sees Mayniel and her friends in the casual cadence of an extended hang out session—rolling joints, dancing in unison, with Plague Dogs flickering on the TV. Above all else, the comment section is the place where it becomes most clear that Oklou has built a devoted and seemingly kindred fanbase, who experience her work with the same kind of evocative poetry that she pours into it. They describe her music with images both sensory and cinematic in specificity—“the smell of moist grass as the sun rises,” “driving home from the beach at sunset through fields of sunflowers,” “a breakup in a Pacific Northwest winter in the 2020s.” It captures how Mayniel herself conceives of music. “It’s the soundtrack of your life,” she explains. “And I like to think about it that way. Music is an elevation—it makes you feel even more alive than what you can experience in life. It has helped me go deep into whatever emotions I was feeling. It helped me experience them—like, times ten.”
Right now, those emotions are a mix of excitement and apprehension—ushering in the album’s deluxe edition (including a feature with FKA twigs) and embarking on a US/Europe tour with a baby in tow. “I’m excited, but I’m really scared,” she admits.“ I just hope it doesn’t disturb him too much.” And though she looks forward to imparting the world of imagination that has come to form all that is Oklou, Mayniel is all the more excited about the memories that won’t stick—the rare, unforeseeable moments that might, in time, become Zakaria’s own madeleines de Proust, and transport him back to this era of softness. It’s an earnestly romantic concept that perfectly reflects the tenderness Mayniel seems to radiate—whether in music, memory, or motherhood.
Jacket FETTICO
Photography OLGA VAROVA & ALEX BRUNET
Styling PIERRE DEMONES
Talent OKLOU
Hair & Make-up KEVYN CHARO
Production LUCY MULLAN
Production Assistant JEREMY EL ASRY
Set Design CAMILLE ROUSSEAU
Styling Assistant JOHAN KIERASINSKI
Post Production DUST AND GRAIN
