The story of the Charlotte Cardin new album is, at its core, a story about patience, about a Montréal musician who has spent more than a decade refusing to rush and is now, by almost every measure, being proved right. When Ten Magazine met Cardin on an East London set, smooth jazz drifted through at her politely communicated request while she posed atop a grand piano dressed in Saint Laurent, Givenchy and McQueen. A few days later, calling from her studio in Montréal, she sounded considerably less interested in discussing chart positions than in finally finishing the record she plans to release in January.
Charlotte Cardin New Album Arrives After a Year of Extraordinary Reach
The numbers surrounding her recent output are, frankly, difficult to absorb all at once. Her bilingual track Feel Good became the most-played Francophone song on French radio in 2025, climbing to No. 5 on the French Singles Chart and surpassing 125 million streams worldwide. According to Spotify, the track has since been certified Diamond in France, a level of certification that places it in genuinely rare company. Across her catalogue as a whole, streams have exceeded one billion.
Earlier in the year, the Victoires de la Musique named her Female Artist of the Year at France’s most prestigious music awards, placing her among only a handful of French-Canadian women to receive the honour, Céline Dion among them, back in 1995. Billboard Canada, for its part, crowned her Global Woman of the Year in 2025. None of which, speaking to her, she seems particularly preoccupied with.
The groundwork for this moment was laid well before Feel Good. Her 2021 debut album, Phoenix, was certified Platinum and, according to Spotify, made her the first Canadian since Céline Dion to top the charts, a fact she does not volunteer and that you sense she might find slightly beside the point. Her 2023 sophomore record, 99 Nights, pushed her further onto the international stage. Feel Good arrived after all of that, and she is still reluctant to call it a breakthrough. ‘I have a feeling that, overall, my career has evolved and progressed in an organic, natural way,’ she says. ‘My fanbase has grown with me.’
From La Voix to Sicily: The Long Arc of a Singular Voice
Cardin grew up in Montréal, born into a household where music was not simply encouraged but expected. Her grandmother, a music teacher, gathered the family around the piano after dinner for Québécois folklore songs; her grandfather harmonised. Her father filled road trips with Led Zeppelin, Prince, Jimi Hendrix and The Rolling Stones; her mother leaned towards French and Québécois singer-songwriters. Cardin and her sister would then insist on Beyoncé or Céline. ‘We would go from listening to Stevie Ray Vaughan to Britney Spears,’ she says with a laugh.
Jazz she discovered herself, in the voices of Nina Simone, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. A classical vocal training, which she began around the age of eight or nine and continues to this day with the same coach, Mireille, gave her a technical foundation she has since applied to pop, electronic production and flashes of rock and chanson française. ‘I make pop music,’ she will say, deflecting any attempt to overcomplicate it. The result is a voice that carries emotional weight in any language.
Working bilingually remains central to everything she makes. French, she explains, carries a softness she cannot quite recreate elsewhere; English gives her permission to be bolder. ‘I associate this maternal, comforting aspect to French,’ she says. ‘But there’s something a little bit stronger, a little bit sassier, that I allow myself to express in English.’
Her most recent single, Take Me Back, arrived with a cinematic video directed by the Oscar-nominated Québécois filmmaker Vincent René-Lortie, shot across Sicily. It follows on, in spirit, from the video for The Way We Touch, and leans into symbolism, crashing waves, power shifts, the creeping sense that some decisions resist undoing. ‘It’s about wanting the option to leave,’ Cardin says, ‘and then once you get that option… all you want is permission to return.’
She now splits her time between Montréal and Paris, the latter having opened creative doors and introduced new collaborators. But Montréal remains home: her team is based there, her family are nearby, and when she is not recording she is happiest wandering Mile End with a coffee from Olimpico and a crossword in a park. Following European summer festival dates, she has plans to return to the UK, the US and Canada once the Charlotte Cardin new album is out. Ten Magazine‘s full interview with Cardin appears in Issue 77, on newsstands 18 September.
