daoud - ok (2025)

With “ok”, his new album and ACT debut, French trumpeter ‘daoud’ offers a quiet manifesto - a record shaped by contrast and contradiction, by collapse and the stubborn act of beginning again. Built around the idea of accepting what cannot be changed. He explains: “The whole record is built around the concept of reluctant acceptance of things that you can’t control. All right, fuck it, fine, I guess.” The album explores failure, loss, repetition, and the soft absurdity of pretending everything’s fine. Across 14 tracks, daoud weaves tragedy and humor, chaos and tenderness, melody and noise into a rich and emotionally charged soundscape.

At its core, “ok” is a jazz record treated like anything but a jazz record. The foundation of the music was created live in the studio, together with keyboardist Leo Colman, double bassist Louis Navarro, drummer Silvan Strauss, electric bassist/guitarist/keyboardist Jules Minck and keyboardist Kuz. The editing of these recordings was more akin to a pop production, yet the sounds, pads and textures added afterwards are subtle and refined. The elaborate production is topped by a striking line-up of international musical guests who lend the music even more facets and emotions: corto.alto (trombone / GB), Rosie Frater-Taylor (guitar & vocals / UK), Mehdi Nassouli (guembri / MOR), Ludivine Issambourg (flute / FR), Teis Semey (guitar / NL), Kuba Więcek (alto saxophone / PL) and Julien Fillion (tenor saxophone / CA). The result sounds organic and immediate, as if you feel the production more than hear it. The album blends jazz, hip-hop, rock, disco, Afrobeat and drum’n’bass - not as genres to explore, but as emotional textures in a broader narrative.

What emerges is a tone both satirical and melancholic, where humor masks deeper sadness, and childish playfulness veils inner tension. “ok” is an album of contradictions: lightness built on weight, sincerity laced with irony, warmth streaked with anxiety. There’s a deep sense of emotional dissonance — exposing what hides behind the act of saying “ok” when you’re not. It’s the sound of things breaking quietly, of resilience masked by routine. This duality runs through everything daoud creates - including the visual world of “ok”. The album cover features a childhood photo of him, capturing the vulnerability and raw innocence that echo throughout the music, the covers of the digital singles are illustrated with simple, childlike black marker drawings. The aesthetic draws on fragility, impermanence, and the bittersweet tension between playfulness and pain.

And behind it all stands daoud. “I've been obsessed with the idea of being a circus clown since I was like 3 years old”, he recalls the starting point of his life as a musician. “I must have seen a clown on TV or somewhere else playing the trumpet and thought that this was the instrument that a clown had to play. So that's how I picked the trumpet - not out of classical ambition, but for its absurd theatricality.” That tension in the figure of the clown - between the comic and the tragic, the graceful and the ridiculous - has defined daoud’s relationship with music ever since.

After a few early attempts at classical and jazz training, he dropped out. He wandered across Europe and the U.S., lived in backrooms, delivered pizzas, worked at a funeral home, played football and boxed obsessively. He quit music altogether more than once. “I think I gave up playing music because it meant so much to me that I needed to prove I could still exist without it.” Eventually, he returned to music — on his own terms. Trumpeter, producer, beatmaker, composer, engineer — he taught himself everything. “I’m so grateful I’m alive during the Internet era. If you want to learn something, you just can.” He works 18 hours a day, seven days a week. His self-produced 2024 debut “GOOD BOY”, recorded in just three days, drew immediate attention for its emotional force and genre-defying clarity. Since then, daoud has produced and written for other artists in pop and hip-hop, while continuing to refine his own singular voice.

“ok” is the distilled essence of that journey — sonically, emotionally, and spiritually. ‘’Contrasts and contradictions shove us and rattle us and make us feel things in the way that homogeneous environments don't.” says daoud. “For me, this is where human emotions live.“ It is the scope and depth of emotions that make the album so extraordinary. It doesn’t offer clarity. It doesn’t pretend things are fine. It asks what it means to carry on anyway.

TRACKLIST

1. daoud - dijon
2. daoud - plato's twins
3. daoud - la fièvre
4. daoud - l'oeil de jules
5. daoud - ame
6. daoud - 3114
7. daoud - le bâtard
8. daoud - everything but sex
9. daoud - soda
10. daoud - plagiat
11. daoud - l.p.a.m.
12. daoud - mathilde
13. daoud - ck
14. daoud - loulou & the loulous