If you have not yet spent any time with Oklou's Choke Enough album, I recommend that you remedy that situation quickly. The French singer and producer released her LP earlier this year, and it was #1 on our mid-year list. Choke Enough is a gorgeous blur -- all these cooler-than-thou rave and pop sounds refracted through one person's internal prism, made to sound small and personal and evocative. Today, Oklou releases her Choke Enough deluxe edition. Deluxe editions often seem like cash-grabs, but this feels more like an opportunity to dive a little deeper into the world of that album.
Oklou announced the Choke Enough deluxe a few weeks ago. It's got four bonus tracks, and we already posted the loudest and most attention-demanding of them, the FKA twigs collab "Viscus." The three remaining new songs are not underground superstar team-ups. Instead, all of them focus on different sides of her Choke Enough sound. "what's good" and "the fishsong unplugged" are both relatively serene acoustic ballads; "the fishsong unplugged," in particular, is pretty much coffeehouse folk. Oklou only delves into club sounds on one of the tracks, the Sega Bodega production "dance 2," but that's a good one. Listen to all three tracks below.
Oklou also recently taped an episode of NPR's series of Tiny Desk Concerts, and hers went up online yesterday. She took the opportunity to radically reimagine three songs from Choke Enough, as well as the new bonus track "what's good" -- no dance beats anywhere. Oklou herself played marimba, guitar, piano, and recorder during the show. Her regular collaborator Casey MQ also played a bunch of instruments, and he arranged the choir that sang backup behind the two of them. At various points, the folks in the choir did sound-effect work, doing things like crinkling paper and tinfoil into microphones to imitate the sound of rain. It was all much more twee than I was expecting, but those songs still hit in this format. Watch it below.
Choke Enough Deluxe is out now on True Panther. Read our interview with Oklou here.
