Oklou is a very interesting pop singer, and after her sold-out show at the Warfield Friday night I’d go as far as to call her a star. She’s not playing in the same field as someone like Dua Lipa; rather, her cult is hyperpop-adjacent, a melange of Sophie worshippers and hyper-online queer kids, the crowd among which mentioning the name A.G. Cook elicits a deafening whoop—despite her music not really being aligned with most hyperpop. Even when it builds to deafening rave climaxes, as on “Harvest Sky” featuring the Bay Area-rooted rising star Underscores, Oklou’s pop isn’t exaggerated but muted. It’s really more of a 21st-century update on Baroque pop, spiritually closer to what mid- to late-20th century auteurs like Brian Wilson, Judee Sill, or even Nina Simone were doing, even if her heavy use of Auto-Tune would sound alien to that generation’s ears.
Oklou is the alias of 32-year-old Marylou Mayniel. She’s from Poitiers, France, though her music is in English and betrays few regional specificities. Her classical training shines through in her use of polyphony in her music, her soprano functioning as something akin to a woodwind; at the Warfield she augmented her performance of “Thank You For Recording” with an actual recorder. At another point in the show she picked up a bass guitar, and the encore was reserved for the acoustic guitar-driven “Blade Bird.” These displays of virtuosity didn’t feel like cynical mongering for rockist points so much as affirmations that Oklou is a musician who became a pop star, one who finds a modicum of old-fashioned virtue in the spectacle of constructing songs live—in the process cutting an uncommonly auteurish figure within a branch of pop fandom whose regard for baby-boom ideals of authenticity ranges from agnostic to contemptuous.
There’s a Seriousness to her music that makes it alluring, and she certainly benefits from a pop zeitgeist that privileges quasi-classical affectations—see Rosalia’s polyglot Lux era and Charli XCX’s Wuthering Heights mini-symphonies. But she’s subtler than those artists, so much so that it took two or three listens to her 2025 album Choke Enough to figure out what she was really doing. Her lyrics blur together enough that you might miss her left-of-center references (the helicopter-sampling “Plague Dogs” interprets a 1977 anthro-animal tragedy by Watership Down author Richard Adams) and expressionistic images (“Thank You For Recording” describes being rocked to sleep in a “tornado swing”). She leaves space in her music and on stage for ambiguity; the white-draped noise tables of her set evoked a potential dinner table, perhaps in reference to her domestic home life as a new mother, and the spatial geometry of the Last Supper.
What is most curious about her music is how fluent it is in the language of the internet despite being largely unconcerned with it as a subject. Mayniel is old enough to remember the dawn of the internet firsthand: the way the virtual world had a certain intrinsic awe, as if we were glimpsing a new kind of nature. Her aesthetic bears a whiff of what those born past its peak call “Gen X soft club,” an ideal of atmospheric pop formed from borrowed Ray of Light and Velvet Rope nostalgia. But even the phrase “thank you for recording” is deployed cryptically, contrasting with that implausible idea of a tornado swing to create a sensation more Magrittean than Trecartinesque. And her lyrics are filled with natural imagery and half-dreamed feelingscapes, reading on the page more like poetically informed diary entries than the typical sweet nothings of pop songs.
This is in contrast to opener Vickie Cherie, a French artist who worked with Mayniel on her 2025 album Cherie on Top, but who unlike her collaborator sings almost entirely in her mother tongue. Cherie was all about screens. In a trick I’ve never seen onstage before, she performed from behind a sheer length of fabric stretched into the proportions of a large TV screen, on which was broadcast imagery both idyllic (owls, horses) and apocalyptic (what looked like red-tinted war zones). Behind the “screen,” Cherie kept her hair dangled low like Sadako from the Ring films, positioning herself as an avatar of what might happen if the virtual world decided to actually reach out and kill you.
I’m not sure how this trick would look from the balcony, but it was remarkably effective from the front, where kids were packed like sardines. This was my first time on the ground floor for a sold-out Warfield show, and the crowd was mostly young and queer, with the usual gaggle of older leather-jacketed dudes towards the back that seems to show up at every big concert no matter how youth-centered and au courant the artist. Mayniel played the Independent last time she was in town, and it’s not a stretch to imagine her filling up a spot like the Masonic or the Bill Graham on her next run.
Mayniel owes much of her success to the efforts of Chaotic Good, the ubiquity-goosing PR firm whose legions of fanbots offer a sketchy but effective route for artists looking to make the leap to the center of the conversation. It seems impossible to make it in music these days without humiliating yourself, either by turning yourself into a brand or by leaving your fate in the hands of neo-payola hucksters. But the frequent brilliance of the artists on the Chaotic Good client list—soul deconstructionist Dijon, baby-faced guitar wizard Mk.gee, generational talent Cameron Winter—suggests the agency imposes some level of quality control, refusing to take on artists that don’t have the goods to keep the conversation going once the agency has done its dubious part. Oklou’s audience may have been manufactured by bots, but their applause wasn’t.
