Albums of the Year 2025: #2

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 have 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 see it as built on a permanent conversation between a life anchored in reality and another in fantasy”, she says.

Indeed, Mayniel says the 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.

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.