Marylou Mayniel is Oklou, a French producer and songwriter whose work we’ve been covering for a while. After giving us little drops of material every few months for the past couple of years, Mayniel is now releasing her first full-length project, a mixtape called Galore. Championed by pop industry spearheads like A.G. Cook or Mary-Anne Hobbs, Oklou is an artist that resists definition. Her first releases were sometimes wildly different from each other, as Mayniel tried her luck with synth-pop, R&B, bubblegum pop, and even ambient, to varying degrees of success.

Galore is not going to change that. Mayniel has mentioned that the songwriting process for the mixtape was one of soul-searching. It is only natural to question your character as an artist when you spend your first steps genre-hopping. She cast doubt over her own identity, even going as far as claiming that she didn’t exist as an artist yet.

Hopefully Galore has dispelled any doubts Mayniel might have had about her status as an artist. However, this is no rebirth – more of a doubling down, really. This wonderful, weird mixtape takes all the potential glimpsed in Oklou’s early tracks and goes all the way with it. Galore is supposed to be divided into three different parts, but you are none the wiser after learning that. Every song here is its own private island: “girl on my throne” is modern R&B built over a quasi-trap beat, opener “little one” is an extremely lo-fi short track merging live performance with field recording, while “nighttime” is the sort of heavily-autotuned, bubblegum pop ballad that would fall right into place in a Charli XCX album.

Galore never tries to pretend to be more than what it actually is. The word “mixtape” is often used liberally by artists who simply don’t want to raise the stakes when they’re putting out material that might not be up to standard. That’s not the case here. This is a proper mixtape, a collection of short pop songs that might all share the same open-hearted, straight-to-the-gut ethos, but that are ultimately rather varied in form. If there’s an underlying current here, that would be the heavy focus on melody. Galore has earworms for days, from the New Romantic playfulness of the title track to the slick and groovy “another night”, the sort of modern pop production job you would expect from pop music’s A-listers.

And therein lies the secret. At her young age, Oklou has become an accomplished producer, one who can seamlessly navigate through different genres and moods. Not only the production work is extremely careful, but every synth tone is also painstakingly chosen, every beat exactly matching up the energy of the vocal melody. It’s that every track is amplified and given their own singular treatment so they all live up to their potential. Even the more undercooked tracks, on paper more rough sketches than fully fleshed out songs, end up becoming some of the most appealing. For instance, “asturias” is an interlude that feels more like a one-minute chorus.

Part of Galore’s charm resides in how low-key it is. Every song is unusually brief, making the big genre leaps not jarring at all. Take “fall”, the album’s most straightforward track. It’s a sort of Gen-Z Carly Rae Jepsen song: a wide-eyed heartbreaker where bombast is replaced by minimalism. Just before the second chorus is over, the song suddenly ends and transitions into “unearth me”, one of the slow-burners Galore has to offer. Within the mixtape’s first six minutes, you’re already made aware that this is going to be a weird one.

Even the one outlier, the closer “i didn´t give up on you”, devotes more than half of its eight-minute running time to pure silence and a few nature ambient noises. It’s one of the rare moments where the mixtape signals towards something more grandiloquent only to make a complete 180. With acoustic guitar arpeggios floating over choir-esque synths, the track just falls short of being as moving as something off Frank Ocean’s Blonde. It is that good, which makes it even more unsatisfying when it just stops there instead of taking it all the way to Intense Town.

But in the end, that would be a betrayal of what Oklou has come to stand for. Galore may be carefully compartmentalised, every song standing in its own right, but these eleven tracks share the same heart. This is pop music at its most blunt and restless. These songs don’t just stay there lingering; they have an aim and they won’t overextend their welcome once it has been completed. It turns out that Oklou’s defining point as an artist is not her constant genre-hopping but the impressively concise and effective ways in which she shifts shape.

If you’re regularly reading HighClouds, you know we are under the charm of French artist Oklou since the release of her 2018 EP, The Rite Of May. Embracing her singer-songwriter side more and more, Marylou Mayniel (her real name) is now readying the release of her first mixtape, Galore, of which she just revealed the second part (the first three tracks were released earlier this month).

Alongside “nighttime” and “rosebud”, she has also shared a Kevin Elamrani-Lince-directed video for “god’s chariots”, which is once again sublime let’s be honest. “It’s a fantasy, a place you’re in to escape reality, but it’s also about being so lonely that you kind of lose your mind,” explained Lou about the track.

French producer, vocalist and songwriter Marylou Mayniel, aka Oklou, shares today the first part of her upcoming mixtape Galore, which will be revealed in three stages over the coming months. “Before this, I did a lot of soul searching and I sometimes felt that I didn’t exist, artistically,” she explains. “‘Galore’ made me feel alive, which is what I was missing up to now.”

Playing with dreams and reality as well as beauty and gloom, her first full-length project is introduced with the surreal video of “unearth me”, which was directed by Parisian filmmaker Kevin Elamrani-Lince. A few days ago, Oklou was also invited by COLORS to perform “fall,” the opening track of the mixtape which is also unveiled today.

We are totally speculating but it looks like Oklou has a project on the way (or not). After the bewitching “Forever” last year and a duo with Flavien Berger on “Toyota,” Marylou Mayniel already drops a new track, “entertnmnt,” co-written with Mura Masa. “I’ve been so freaking lucky to meet Mura Masa for this one, and for the first time let someone take care of the production entirely which I have no regrets about because it’s banging,” she explained on her Instagram. The vocals treatment and the synths are indeed simply hypnotic. The track comes with an Alexandra Green-directed video, which is reminiscent of Caroline Polachek’s recent live performance on Jimmy Kimmel.

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It has been too long since Marylou Mayniel, better known as Oklou, shared her beautiful EP The Rite Of May. After almost 18 months of silence, the French producer, vocalist, and songwriter has now returned with an ethereal and delicate new single, “Forever”, which explores a little bit more the pop and R&B soundscapes already heard on tracks like “Friendless” and “Samuel”. About this initiatory new track, she explained:

[su_quote]‘Forever’ is about forgiveness and using mistakes as some sort of cement. Something that is so powerful that you’ll remember it forever.[/su_quote]

Watch the accompanying Roxanne Gaucherand-directed video below.

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