Plenty of artists have made exciting music this decade by fusing crystalline, cutting-edge club music to melodies and rhythms rooted in R&B and pop. The same goes for the work of Marylou Mayniel, the French singer and producer who records as Oklou, whose music is almost scientifically midway between accessible and experimental. Her new EP, The Rite of May, is full of dewy vocal passages rendered cool and distant by heavy processing; when she posted a note about single “They Can’t Hear Me” on Facebook last month, she thanked Bok Bok, the head of the London experimental club label Night Slugs, for “turning a soft ballade into a shiny track.” That’s her zone: the space between soft and shiny.
The Rite of May’s thematic heft is tied up in its sound rather than its writing, which is often obscured by a slathered-on layer of Auto-Tune. Its four main tracks are broken up with two enigmatic interludes that sample Instagram stories and field recordings, and the descending motif that cracks open “Samuel” reappears sounding like JRPG soundtrack fodder on “Valley 2.” There’s clearly a vision at work, one that’s apparent even over just 20 minutes of material. This isn’t music that demands you take it seriously—Mayniel evokes the naïveté of childhood by sampling a clip of Cardi B stumbling on a deer outside her hotel room—but it encourages you to look for emotional resonance in its downcast melodies and near-future textures rather than its lyrics.
What you hear may bum you out: The Rite of May oozes loneliness. Mayniel has a great ear for space—the luminous melody at the core of “Samuel” dissipates like fog on a silver pond—but her music is rarely expansive or collaborative. It sounds like the product of late, silent nights in a bedroom with a laptop. The closest the EP gets to joy is “They Can’t Hear Me,” and that’s only because it alludes to the glistening maximalism of producers like Rustie in its second half; when you look past the glittering keyboards, you hear an android crying out for any kind of response. Mammoth closer “Friendless” is an extended exploration of how much it sucks when no one wants to hang out with you. The sense of disconnection is nearly overwhelming.
While there’s no denying The Rite of May’s coherence or concision, something about it leaves you a little cold. It’s not just the ice imagery spiked throughout “Friendless.” Mayniel has no trouble stringing a sticky vocal phrase together, but her penchant for digital obfuscation and vague, unintelligible writing makes it hard to connect with her as a presence. These songs aren’t direct or emotive enough to work as pure pop, but they don’t have the transgressiveness or daring to feel totally satisfying from an experimental perspective. That’s the thing about occupying the middle ground: it’s a safe space, but you don’t have the leverage you need to really turn the listener’s head.
