When Charlotte Cardin appears on screen from Paris, she’s almost at the end of the fashion week whirlwind. Once upon a time, the Canadian singer-songwriter could be found on the runways herself: back in the mid-2010s, she even walked for the likes of Jacquemus and Christopher Kane. Thanks to her Jane Birkin cheekbones and statuesque height, she continues to find herself pulled into the industry’s orbit, even well over a decade into her career as a musician—this season, she took in the Saint Laurent show from the front row. Right now, however, she’s ready to focus on the music. “Mostly promo and the album announcement,” she says, smiling. “All of that fun stuff.”
After all, Cardin—who divides her life between Paris and her hometown of Montreal—is on the precipice of a new chapter. On Friday, she unveiled her slinky, retro-tinged new single, “Memories” (alongside a twin-track French counterpart, “Souvenir,” but more on that later). And more crucially, it serves as the official introduction to her ambitious third studio album, Midnight, Mon Amour, announced this week and set for release on January 29 via The Orchard and Cult Nation.
It’s taken a minute to get here. The album’s announcement comes more than three years after her sophomore LP, 2023’s 99 Nights, which swept the Juno Awards (nicknamed the Canadian Grammys) and won album of the year. That followed the runaway success of her 2021 debut, Phoenix, which made her the first Canadian artist to top the nation’s Billboard albums chart since Céline Dion in 2016.
Yet the road to this third record took a sudden, serendipitous detour early last year. She’d initially planned to take the whole year of 2025 to focus on the album. “We already had a few songs written, but I had in mind that I would take months off and just dive into creative mode,” Cardin explains. Then, last January, her song “Feel Good” went viral in France. “It was incredible and quite unexpected, because the track had actually come out over a year and a half earlier.” Propelled by TikTok, the song snowballed into a certified smash, racking up over 100 million streams worldwide, and sending Cardin on an impromptu year-long whirlwind of European promotion. “It shifted our plans in the best possible way,” she says.
In between, she would head back to Montreal and work on the album a couple of songs at a time. “In the end, I’m really happy it happened like that,” she adds. “It gave me a lot of space to get inspired by new things, to live life, and to deepen the reflections I wanted to have over a longer period.”
Those deeper reflections became the bedrock of the ravishingly beautiful Midnight, Mon Amour, which burrows into the tangled contradictions of love, longing, and forgiveness. Recorded primarily with Cardin’s longtime creative partner Jason Brando—with whom she has co-written and produced music for 14 years—alongside producer Sam Avant, the record took shape without label pressure, allowing them to make music exactly how they wanted to. “Jason knows me in a way that is so deep and complete,” Cardin says. “Most of our songwriting sessions are just the two of us talking for 90% of the time, dissecting our emotions, talking about psychology, diving deep into things. Then the other 10% is just creating freely together.”
Early in those sessions, the duo alighted on a conceptual framework for the record as a double LP. “Our initial idea was to create two companion records,” she says. “We would have this pop, brighter, more produced album, and then we would have what we referred to as the ‘shadow album.’” That album would have featured “mirror versions of the same songs, but much darker and more nostalgic,” she explains. “Digging into the parts of ourselves we hide.”
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Photo: Fred Gervais
While they eventually decided against releasing two separate projects, the spirit of that duality still underpins Midnight, Mon Amour. (There are still traces of it on the final record, with the soft, jazzy opening track “Fleurs,” for example, returning later in a beefed-up, dance floor-ready form and then again as a bouncy, piano-led chanson towards the end.) “It opened up this incredible creative playground and gave me permission to explore extremes,” Cardin explains. “The songs touch on fantasy, dreams, and parts of yourself that you tend to suppress—things you’re not necessarily proud of, or conflicted feelings that coexist within one person. I wanted to make those feelings beautiful and empowering.”
That tension also mirrors Cardin’s bilingual identity. Moving fluidly between French and English across the tracklist—and occasionally within the very same chorus—the record employs the two languages as their own distinct emotional worlds. “Duality is the central theme, and I feel different things in both languages,” she notes. “French is my mother tongue; it’s associated with my most vulnerable, exposed parts. But in English, I get that little bit of extra distance and perspective, which allows me to tell stories I probably wouldn't have told in French. I feel like I can even be funnier in English.”
The record also bridges the two sounds that have defined her career so far: icy Gallic electro-pop and warmer, more retro-leaning songcraft. Both are present here, folded elegantly together to form a rich, romantic whole that veers between the orchestra hall and the dance floor, seamed together with the unexpected throughline of saxophones. “We started playing freely, and every time a song felt like it was missing something, we added a saxophone,” she laughs. “It was the missing spice. It gave the album that touch of cinema we were craving.”
Nowhere is that cinematic alchemy clearer than on “Memories.” Written alongside Brando and fellow Montreal singer-songwriter Patrick Watson, the track began life in an entirely different guise. “I had this chorus for the longest time, and it started as this sad, moody ballad,” Cardin explains. “I loved the melody, but something wasn't clicking. At one point in the studio, Patrick just looked up and said, ‘We need a dubstep drop on this.’ He actually built this insane dubstep drop.” They didn’t end up keeping the drop, but it did help unlock the song. “It made us realize: this isn't a funeral dirge; it’s a rom-com. It’s quirky, it’s fun.”
To accompany the single, Cardin collaborated with choreographer Amy Gardner on a music video that sees her dance with a partner between shadows and mirrors, translating the track’s kinetic fizz into movement. While Cardin has no formal background in dance, movement has become one of her most important narrative instruments while making the album. “Over the last few years, I’ve become so much more comfortable expressing myself physically,” she says. “It’s let me push the storytelling further than lyrics alone can go. It brings me closer to the work.”
The sweeping scope of Cardin’s visual output this time around was deliberate. The dazzling video for “Take Me Back” on the album sees her perform a Beau Travail-esque, wrestling-inspired dance routine and play tug of war with a crew of beefy, tank-topped men along a rugged, windswept coastline, while “The Way We Touch” sees her go full cabaret star, singing and dancing in a smoky underground music hall. She remains committed to world-building on a grand scale. “I know how people consume music now,” she says. “I can post a five-second clip on TikTok that will get more views than a music video I spent four months agonizing over. That’s just the reality, and it’s fine. But social media can’t build a whole world in the same way. For me, music videos are where the mythology comes alive. With this album, everything was so much more cinematic that it demanded real imagery.”
And with Midnight, Mon Amour finally on the horizon, Cardin is already thinking about how to bring it to life onstage, even if no tour dates have been announced just yet. With the disparity between her level of fame in the US and the UK and that in France and her native Canada, she’s grown used to switching between intimate clubs and vast, roaring arenas—a duality that sounds pretty apt for the album’s swerving emotional peaks and troughs. “There’s nothing quite like the physicality of sharing music in a room together,” she says, her eyes brightening. “I want people to feel that entire emotional curve.”
The only hitch? If the strength of an early listen to the album is anything to go by, she might well be graduating to some much bigger venues in the Anglophone world. On this, however, Cardin remains characteristically philosophical. “I just want the music to live, to find its people, and to see where it takes us next.”