Marylou Mayniel might be a traditionalist at heart. “I’ve gotten tired of the internet,” she recently told Crack—striking news for the singer and producer whose first release as Oklou, 2020’s Galore, made her name (pronounced “OK, Lou”) among a certain sect of the terminally online. A classically trained French musician turned London club kid, Mayniel makes electronic pop with the rigor and meticulousness of a Bach cantata. Her debut album, choke enough, is a foggy, twilit fusion of Y2K worship and medieval melodicism, with A.G. Cook and Danny L Harle joining longtime co-producer Casey MQ behind the boards. At once jacked into the mainframe and lost in the wilderness, the record casts Oklou as a cipher in her own music; even as we hear her, we never really know her.

As a founding member of NUXXE, the label and collective that has come to define a certain “art schoolers go to Berghain” sound, Mayniel stood out among her contemporaries for her relative reserve: neither as sensual as Eartheater nor as bawdy as Shygirl. Galore songs like “fall” and “god’s chariots” were puckish and subtle, built on little more than acid-synth arpeggios and the occasional drum loop. Last year, though, I saw Oklou perform in a seventh-story walkup on the Lower East Side. Watching Mayniel’s hands dance nimbly across the keyboard, assembling loops in real time, each instrument—even the guitar she sheepishly picked up to play the then-unreleased single “Blade Bird”—felt like an extension of her person. This, it appeared, must be the world’s most charming cyborg.

On choke enough, that highly skilled performer comes into her own as an artist. The title track is easily Oklou’s best to date, channeling the muffled ambience of a “you’re in the bathroom at a party” video through four minutes of metamorphic trance. In the absence of a four-on-the-floor rhythm, its shifting synth timbres create the effect of a sculpture viewed from different angles, a quality of constantly becoming—yet never quite reaching—shared across most of the songs here. Album opener “Endless” unfurls from a distant hemiola to a misty ballad to a charmingly hesitant keyboard solo: a lone oboe preset that wanders into the mix before almost self-consciously ceding the spotlight back to Mayniel.

Uncanny textures abound. On “Thank You for Recording,” Oklou and her synth flute trade melodies like a cyberpunk Disney princess duetting with the robot bird perched on her finger. The arrangement harkens back to Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, a symphony for children in which each instrument stands in for a different character. Mayniel’s conservatory background crops up throughout choke enough, specifically in her fondness for imitative polyphony, a hallmark of Baroque composition where melodic lines are shared between multiple instruments. The sugar rush of “Ict” boasts a trumpet refrain that plausibly could’ve been written during the 1600s, and the digi-clarinet and tambourine of “Obvious” are straight out of a Renaissance fair. In Oklou’s hands, hyper-quantized digital beats make natural counterparts to the equally precise music composed centuries earlier.

So expressive and dynamic is choke enough’s production that its writing can come off comparatively stilted. There are lyrical threads—neo-pagan imagery is a touchstone, as is the fear of being perceived—but Mayniel’s voice is vastly more effective as pure tone painting. Singing about strawberry dancers and vanilla summers on “Ict,” she becomes one more texture in the mix, one more instrument in the orchestra. By comparison, the album’s featured artists stand out prominently: Bladee on the burbling call for connection “Take Me by the Hand” and homespun hyperpop maker underscores on the clubby centerpiece “Harvest Sky.” This song, inspired by Mayniel’s childhood memories of bonfire celebrations for La Fête de la Saint-Jean, employs traditional folk melodies to paint a hyperreal portrait of the scene. She’s beaming a memory directly through the speakers; the words hardly matter.

Oklou’s work is cognizant of music theory, historical context, and most importantly, motif, which is really just the power of sounds to carry different meanings. Because of this, choke enough sometimes comes across as more formally compelling than it is viscerally moving. Perhaps that’s by design; pop music is so often about the elevation of a persona above all else, a springboard from which to launch a star. I’m not sure that’s what Mayniel wants. “I never really know if I’m being chased,” she sings on the eerie, paranoid interlude “Plague Dogs.” There’s a risk in asking today’s listeners to forgo their insatiable appetite for access, but Oklou has something special to offer in return. Think of choke enough like the shell of a hermit crab: beautiful in its own right, made even more so by the knowledge that there’s a living creature hiding inside.