‘Alt girls get their flowers’: Oklou and PinkPantheress go head-to-head

This story is taken from the spring 2026 issue of Dazed, which is on sale internationally from March 5. Pre-order a copy of the magazine here.

Oklou has dreamt up a universe of her own. The French singer, producer and DJ draws you into her diaphanous world through her experimental electro-pop and the ethereal visuals that accompany it. One NTS session last winter saw her perform at an ice rink in Streatham, cocooned in a puffer jacket with rope-long plaits grazing her knees as diamanté-dripped skaters twirled around her. In last year’s video for “viscus”, she prowled around a blue-lit garage in search of a glassy red flute alongside FKA twigs. And in the clip for “take me by the hand”, she was caught in the midst of a blizzard inside her purple-washed apartment as another collaborator, Bladee, emerged from a glowing portal like a creature from another dimension. 

Raised in the countryside outside Poitiers, a city in western France, the musician born Marylou Mayniel has spent the past 13 years conjuring escapist soundscapes from the underbelly of experimental pop. Grounded in classical training and shaped by the more exploratory edges of electronic music, her work bends the genre towards something more atmospheric. With her debut album, last year’s choke enough, she lured in a wider audience through her bruised meditations on intimacy and connection in the digital age. The record featured at the top of numerous best-album lists in 2025, including our own. 

For her first Dazed cover, Oklou sat down on Zoom to field questions from fellow pop auteur PinkPantheress. The pair can barely remember where they first met, only that it was at an indie show several years prior. But the entanglement of their musical worlds is far easier to identify, from their work with producers like Danny L Harle and Casey MQ to pairing up on their own track, “Girl Like Me + Oklou’, last year. 

Since that first encounter, their interactions have largely played out online, which is fitting for two people whose early careers have been tethered to the internet: Oklou found her audience at the digital fringes of Europe’s experimental pop underground, sharing tracks to SoundCloud and YouTube, while PinkPantheress drew in listeners with self-produced snippets that gained traction online. 

Over the past few years, both have definitively emerged from alt corners of the internet to amass legions of devoted fans; it’s from this context that Oklou’s debut album emerged. As she unleashed choke enough into the universe, the musician was preparing for another life shift: in spring 2025, she welcomed the birth of her first child, Zakaria. She continued making music during this period, dropping a trance-inflected remix album and clocking up cameos on Danny LHarle’s Cerulean and PinkPantheress’ own remix project Fancy Some More? 

Now, ahead of a year filled with festival appearances where their orbits will collide once more, the pair connect through the screen to discuss motherhood, Auto-Tune and growing up in public.

PinkPantheress: I had the privilege of having you jump on my remix tape and I felt like that was the perfect combination of our sounds. I remember your manager was like, ‘She’s so busy right now, but she really wants to do this.’ I was just thinking to myself, ‘How do you manage the time between being a new mum and having this flourishing career?’ 

Oklou: I think I had just given birth so I wasn’t working at all. But it’s true that I really wanted to do the remix. I was not going to say no to PinkPantheress there’s no way! So, you know, I drank some orange juice and it was fine. That was the beginning of the postpartum, which was extremely insane – it was chaos. I had time off in the summer and then from September I got back to work and touring. It was harder than I’d imagined, even though I knew it would be difficult. You need to learn how to do every aspect of everyday life differently. It’s crazy, but you have no choice anyway, so you make it work.

PinkPantheress: Just for the record, I really want to have a child. 

Oklou: I know! I’ve heard you saying this during an interview, and I thought it was really cool.

PinkPantheress: When I saw you, I was just like, ‘I would do anything for this to be me.’ I always think that when cool artists like yourself have babies. When your son grows up, he’s gonna listen to your music and realise his mum is so cool.

Oklou: [laughs]

PinkPantheress: Anyway, it’s been great to see you receive so much praise for choke enough. Did anything about the reaction to your album surprise you?

Oklou: Yes, I was super surprised and still am. I was nominated for this new prize in France [the Prix Joséphine], for best album of the year, and I won. I was so far from thinking it could ever have happened for this album. Obviously, I have my opinion about the record – I love it, but I also know its flaws but I’m so grateful and happy that people are more gentle with it than I am.

PinkPantheress: I’m so happy. As someone who also makes alternative electronic [music], it’s nice to see alternative girls get their flowers. When I try to describe your music, I literally just can’t. It’s so specific to you. The instrumentation and the way that your voice interacts with it... it feels really hard to put into a category. It almost reminds me of medieval music, that's kind of what I love about it. Do you find that you struggle when you don’t fit into a genre? Has it been hard to find your space in the music industry?

Oklou: Well, before finding it hard to fit in the music industry, I just thought it was hard to find my sound. It took me years, which is natural, but I was experimenting before Galore [Oklou’s mixtape, released in 2020]. It took me some time because I did it all alone; I wanted to be in charge because instrumentation is very important for me. Regarding the music industry, honestly, I just don’t think about it. But I want to return the compliment. Your sound is so unique, and you have this quality that cannot be done by anybody else.

“It took me years to find my sound because I wanted to be in charge”

PinkPantheress: Oh, thank you very much. I really want to know, because your voice in your music sounds so ethereal. If you care to share, do you process your vocals and how? 

Oklou: I process them a lot; I always have. That’s because the melodies I choose to write cannot be done without Auto-Tune. I’ve been singing since I was a child in choirs and bands so I can sing, but eventually I chose to put my voice at the service of the melody and not the other way around. What about you? 

PinkPantheress: I’m the same as you. I use it stylistically for my melodies, because I think our melodies are sometimes quite similar. I have an obsession with sounding exactly how I sound on the track live, even if people are sometimes like, ‘Oh, she must be lip-syncing because it sounds exactly the same.’ I see so many comments where people don’t really know what Auto-Tune is or why it’s used. I just don’t think people have any tolerance for it to be used in stylistic ways. It took me a long time to figure it out, because I lost a lot of hearing in one ear. I’m still figuring a lot out as a performer. Do you get stage fright? Or would you say that you’re pretty confident? 

Oklou: No, I think I’m confident now. But if it’s the start of a new live show and I have a lot of things to think about during the show, I can be pretty stressed out. I learned to manage stress at a really young age because I was on stage doing classical auditions when I was at music school. I learned that if you make a mistake, it’s really OK and nothing bad’s gonna happen when you get on stage. That really followed me until today, which is a great tool, because it makes the experience easy for me. 

PinkPantheress: I haven’t had the privilege of seeing you live. When you were on tour I was also on tour, so I couldn’t see you. 

Oklou: I saw you live a while ago. I think it was Primavera Sound in Los Angeles [in 2022].

PinkPantheress: Oh my God, that is horrible. You need to see me perform now. 

Oklou: No, it was great. You felt so confident, with the handbag.

PinkPantheress: [laughs] Yes, every time. Thank you very much. When you were making choke enough, [coughs] – oh my God, I’m choking now – what was the process between you and Casey [MQ]?

Oklou: Casey fills in spaces where I either don’t know what to do or have an idea I can’t fully realise on my own. He helps shape the lyrics and we spend hours discussing the album as a whole – the meaning behind it, the titles, the track order.

PinkPantheress: That reminds me a lot of how [Casey and I] work together as well. It’s actually so funny because he has a major in classical music. I find it hilarious that there’s a big link between classical composers and electronic music.

“Arca texted me at the end of my show, and she was like, ‘That was so cunt.’ And I remember not knowing what cunt meant. I was like, ‘What the fuck does that mean?’”

Oklou: I love it. I think that’s what I’ve been looking for, having grown up in a very academic universe where people have elitist opinions on pop music. When I discovered PC Music and the work of Danny [L Harle], Sophie and AG Cook, I found in their music this love for and prioritisation of seeking the emotion first. I could feel this love for pop music, which was significant for me.

PinkPantheress: You can really hear it in your music as well, almost like it’s a branch of PC Music. Even some of my own music I would describe as being in a similar space. I met so many great artists when I was young and I’ve always felt incredibly lucky to learn from people like that, to absorb their insight, which musically shaped me a lot. I consider Danny to be a mentor of mine. My favourite song on choke enough is ‘take me by the hand’ with Bladee. I love Bladee. Have you known him for a while?

Oklou: I met him for the first time in a living room in London – this was in 2015, I think. I was hanging out with my friend Barbara [Braccini, AKA French producer Malibu], and I have followed his project ever since. But we never got in touch until ‘take me by the hand’.

PinkPantheress: One of the first artists I ever met was Arca. That was one of my first ever shows; Dua Lipa came to my 100-person show and then the next night Arca came. They were just stood at the back. I’ll never forget Arca texted me at the end, and she was like, ‘That was so cunt.’ And I remember not knowing what cunt meant. I was like, ‘What the fuck does that mean? Did she just call me...? Did she just say it was bad?’ [laughs] That was the first introduction I had to this world and it was so crazy. I still can’t believe it.

This is such a random question, but do you sleep with your baby in the bed? I actually am so curious.

Oklou: [laughs] Yeah. It’s a topic I could talk about for hours. But I do sleep with my baby because I want to sleep as well. One day it will be over, but he really wants to be in the bed with us  and sleeps better when he is.

PinkPantheress: That is so cute. I’m glad we got to speak. I hope we get to meet again at Laneway [Festival]! Even though we met years ago.

Oklou: Yeah... I guess we’re going to be together, right!

Hair Kevyn Charo, make-up Satoko Watanabe at Artlist Paris using M.A.C, nails Eden Tonda, set design Beatrice Bonino, photographic assistant Ricardo Muñoz Carter, styling assistants Cait Hallam, Maria Fernandez, Alizée Tilagone Le Borgne, production Clémence Delafontaine at Company Paris, production assistants Simon Bandiera, Luc de la Motte, post-production Lengua at Drive Represents.

This story is taken from the spring 2026 issue of Dazed, which is on sale internationally from March 5. Pre-order a copy of the magazine here.