It\u2019s taken a minute to get here. The album\u2019s announcement comes more than three years after her sophomore LP, 2023\u2019s 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\u2019s Billboard albums chart since C\u00e9line Dion in 2016.<\/p>\n
Yet the road to this third record took a sudden, serendipitous detour early last year. She\u2019d initially planned to take the whole year of 2025 to focus on the album. \u201cWe already had a few songs written, but I had in mind that I would take months off and just dive into creative mode,\u201d Cardin explains. Then, last January, her song \u201cFeel Good\u201d went viral in France. \u201cIt was incredible and quite unexpected, because the track had actually come out over a year and a half earlier.\u201d 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. \u201cIt shifted our plans in the best possible way,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
In between, she would head back to Montreal and work on the album a couple of songs at a time. \u201cIn the end, I\u2019m really happy it happened like that,\u201d she adds. \u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s longtime creative partner Jason Brando\u2014with whom she has co-written and produced music for 14 years\u2014alongside producer Sam Avant, the record took shape without label pressure, allowing them to make music exactly how they wanted to. \u201cJason knows me in a way that is so deep and complete,\u201d Cardin says. \u201cMost 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Early in those sessions, the duo alighted on a conceptual framework for the record as a double LP. \u201cOur initial idea was to create two companion records,\u201d she says. \u201cWe would have this pop, brighter, more produced album, and then we would have what we referred to as the \u2018shadow album.\u2019\u201d That album would have featured \u201cmirror versions of the same songs, but much darker and more nostalgic,\u201d she explains. \u201cDigging into the parts of ourselves we hide.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s taken a minute to get here. The album\u2019s announcement comes more than three years after her sophomore…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":630736,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[156,157,111,139,69,5290,1251],"class_list":["post-630735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-textabovecenterfullbleed","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/630735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=630735"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/630735\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/630736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=630735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=630735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=630735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}