On Her Upcoming Third Album, Charlotte Cardin Is Ready to Take On the World

Reported by Vogue.

Charlotte Cardin spent Fashion Week in Paris the way she tends to occupy any room — effortlessly. The Canadian singer-songwriter, who once walked runways for Jacquemus and Christopher Kane in the mid-2010s, was front row at Saint Laurent this season. But the cheekbones and the statuesque frame are almost beside the point now. Cardin is here to talk about the music.

According to Vogue, her third studio album, Midnight, Mon Amour, drops January 29 via The Orchard and Cult Nation — more than three years after her Juno Award-winning sophomore record, 99 Nights. That gap wasn't writer's block; it was life intervening in the best way. Her 2023 track "Feel Good" went viral in France last year, propelled by TikTok into a certified smash with over 100 million streams worldwide. The plans she'd made — a quiet year of writing in Montreal — dissolved into a year of European promotion instead. "It shifted our plans in the best possible way," she says. She'd return to Montreal between dates, building the album two songs at a time, letting inspiration accumulate slowly. The result, she says, gave her space to live more before she wrote.

The Double Album That Wasn't — And Still Kind Of Is

The album began as a concept for two companion records: one bright and pop-produced, one a darker "shadow album" of mirror-image versions of the same songs. They scrapped the split release, but the tension stayed. Midnight, Mon Amour moves between orchestra and dance floor, French and English, fantasy and confession — sometimes within the same chorus. Cardin, who has co-written and produced with collaborator Jason Brando for 14 years, describes their sessions as 90% emotional excavation and 10% creation. "French is my mother tongue — it's associated with my most vulnerable parts," she explains. "In English, I get that extra distance. I can even be funnier in English." The unexpected sonic throughline holding all of it together? Saxophones. "Every time a song felt like it was missing something, we added one. It gave the album that touch of cinema we were craving."

Lead single "Memories" — written with Brando and Montreal artist Patrick Watson — is the album in miniature: a track that started as a moody ballad, briefly became a song with a dubstep drop (seriously), and landed somewhere far better. "It made us realize: this isn't a funeral dirge; it's a rom-com," Cardin says. Its music video, choreographed by Amy Gardner, sees her dancing between shadows and mirrors — movement now being as central to her storytelling as lyrics. The visual world she's building around this record is deliberately grand: a Beau Travail-referencing coastal dance sequence, a full cabaret number, imagery built for screens that can hold mythology, not just a five-second scroll. "Social media can't build a whole world in the same way," she says. "Music videos are where the mythology comes alive."

She's made a record about love's contradictions for an artist who exists in her own set of them — famous enough in France to play arenas, still building in the Anglophone world, straddling two cities, two languages, two versions of herself. Midnight, Mon Amour doesn't resolve that tension so much as lean all the way into it, and that's exactly the point.

Read the original at Vogue.