It’s early evening, still hot, and the shopping district is quiet. August is the summer holiday season. Here in Pau, the sun doesn’t go down until after nine. We’re drinking cool neon citronnade in wavy glasses.
“If I ever cradle my belly/Stepping into the fantasy/Will I wanna go back?” Mayniel sings in “family and friends,” an early single from her acclaimed debut as Oklou, this year’s choke enough. Against a palette of softly glitching synth, Zelda flute, and twittering mechanical birds, the song circles feelings of uncertainty about commitment, sacrifice, and choosing one’s true path. Then the image she’d written about came true: Mayniel, 32, welcomed her first child, her son, Zakaria, in May.
She’d long wanted to be a mother, and she’s loving it. “Some new parents can feel a lack of freedom and a bit, how do you say, out of breath. But I don’t, and I’m really grateful for that,” she says. “In a good way, it’s way more emotionally quiet, calm, than what I thought it would be. It’s a big change of life, but emotionally I feel really calm. And I love him, obviously, very much, and I’m so glad. But it’s very sweet, it’s soft.”
It is a sweet time to be Oklou. Mayniel publicly announced her pregnancy in February, the same day she released choke enough, a slow-burning success that will get a deluxe edition at the end of October. That’s a stacked schedule, but if she had to pass up a few opportunities to promote the record, she says, so be it: “Even without being pregnant, that’s the amount of things that I was willing to do, you know?”
