Pitchfork London 2025: Nick León & Oklou

There are wistful moments in every music fan’s life — usually a boring April afternoon before the sun is truly back in action — when they send a friend a certain kind of message. This message is direct, usually wordless, no more than a screenshot. A pixelated image of a festival lineup from years gone by. A lineup that at the time seemed strong enough but with time has grown to be the stuff of legend. A moment the music can never return to but wishes would happen again. Now reduced to one of All Yesterday’s Parties. 

It’s almost certain that a certain woozy, electronic evening at Pitchfork Musical Festival’s 2025 edition will become one of these lineups.

Opened by French electronic composer Malibu, who’s music is perhaps best described as ‘Juicy Couture ambient’, the evening rolled through a series of breathy, open soundscapes that call to mind the kind of evening you spend staring out of the Thames from a friend’s balcony, feeling on the edge of something you don’t quite have the words for as a girl you don’t know sucks a double raspberry ice vape and blows circles into the frigid air. Lit only by a single beam that scrolled slowly across the audience, the atmosphere gave the audience time to take in the lush production that is the hallmark of Malibu’s recent album Vanities.

From Malibu to Miami, Florida-raised Nick León brought the live edition of A Tropical Entropy to the smaller Studio Theatre space. Backed by sun-soaked visuals of bikinis on beaches, glass skyscrapers wobbling in the head, trucks disappearing into dense fog and the endless, glittering sea, León presented a haunting, hazy vision of the 27th state. Like his contemporaries DJ Python and INVT, León’s work melds pop-inflected dembow and deep reggaeton to twist the genres out of shape, the hallmark riddims and flows used to create a dreamy propulsion, the sort of energy that comes with brown liquor watered down by the humidity. Though many publications have pined for a song of the summer that never came, it’s still not too late to declare León’s ‘Bikini’ with Erika de Casier the true winner.

The main room was headlined by chimeric French experimentalist Oklou, real name Marylou Mayniel, who’s album Choke Enough has already started to crop up on end of year lists. The record is cloudy, often oblique, but rewards relistening. Seemingly throwaway lyrics like ‘I guess I thought the sunshine would be enough or something’, from the FKA-backed ‘Viscus’, hit hardest when their implied intensity creeps up on you so it was hard to imagine how the album would perform live. There should have been no doubt that a musician with Mayniel’s classical training and urban nonchalance would rise to the occasion, however. Quieter sections of the music were reworked to fill the space; pensive synths became booming clublike bass as the singer donned mirrored headgear that reflected shattered light across the audience. The performance felt huge and intimate all at the same time, something you would see while coming up in a Hackney warehouse on New Year’s Eve and remember achingly the next evening.

Perfectly scheduled, each of the artists at the Roundhouse could be called ones to watch if the evening wasn’t already sold out.