I can almost put my finger on a certain aesthetic that feels potent at the moment—it’s starry-eyed and windblown, private but ecstatic, rendered in cool tones but glowing with bright light. You can feel it in photos where sunlight catches water, or the distant lights of a city are seen from inside a plane. And you can feel it, too, in a romantic strain of electronic music, whose ebbs and flows and dopamine-rush chord progressions bring back memories of listening to ’90s Eurodance hits in my childhood bedroom; there, songs of melodramatic heartache always hit the hardest.
More than any other single released so far from Oklou’s forthcoming album, Choke Enough, “take me by the hand” captures this hard-to-pin-down vibe. The French musician (it’s pronounced “okay, Lou”) makes electronic pop music that feels earnest, dazed, and dreamy, with wistful Auto-Tuned melodies that float out over soundscapes from Casey MQ and various PC Music members—in this case Danny L Harle, whose arpeggios lie somewhere between Palmistry’s polyrhythms and a synths-only cover of the Masterpiece Theatre theme song. With her collaborator Bladee, Oklou shares a sense of awe in the strangeness of our world, and through the song’s synthetic shimmer, they reach out towards something real, just beyond their grasp.
