“I was very lucky growing up,” says Charlotte Cardin. “I had a really beautiful childhood.” The 30-year-old Quebecois singer is calling from her apartment in Montreal, near Mount Royal, the quiet suburban town where she and her older sister, Camille, spent their days riding bikes, playing soccer, and dancing in the living room to their parents’ favorite songs. “There was always music in the house,” she says. “My dad’s a huge rock ’n’ roll guy, and my mom loved French [singers].” Her sister added pop to the mix. “That’s when I discovered girl bands—and Celine, Britney, Christina,” she says with a laugh. “I was hooked.”
These days, Cardin splits her time between Montreal and Paris, where she lives with her longtime boyfriend, the musician and Bonjour Tristesse actor Aliocha Schneider, and juggles a constellation of careers: singer-songwriter, globe-trotting performer, L’Oréal ambassador, runway model, and viral TikTok phenomenon.
Cardin has been singing her whole life, starting voice lessons at seven and taking any opportunity to perform for an audience. By the time she got to high school, at Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf, she was writing songs “to get the emotions out that I couldn’t really express in another way.” But in a household of academics—both of her parents are scientists—there was no model for a career in music. “Until I was 18, I was convinced I’d be a doctor,” she says. “I thought I’d follow a traditional path and do music on the side. But it became so obvious that it was the only thing I wanted.”
In 2013, she auditioned for La Voix—the Quebecois spin-off of The Voice—and made it to the finals. “It was a turning point,” she says. “For the first time, I knew there was actually an audience for what I wanted to do.” But she also knew she didn’t want her artistic identity to be defined by reality TV. Determined to put distance between herself and the show, she turned down multiple record deals and returned to school, enrolling in a two-year junior college. “I said no to everything,” she says. “If you want to sign me based on what you saw on television, then you don’t know me as an artist.”
In 2015, while taking odd jobs to make ends meet, Cardin agreed to sing a jingle for a coffee-machine commercial. The session changed everything. “That’s where I met Jason Brando,” she says of the 30-year-old Canadian producer. “We just really hit it off, talking about music. He hired me again the next week, and I played him some of my songs.”
Brando was quietly plotting his exit from the ad world to launch his own record label, Cult Nation. “He told me, ‘I want to sign you. You’ll be the first.’” Two years later, over coffee, he brought Cardin the contract that would make her Cult Nation’s first hire. “Sometimes you just know,” she tells me. “I’ve been on the label for 10 years now.”
Her 2021 debut album, Phoenix, and its 2023 follow-up, 99 Nights, were both slow burns—collectively picking up six Juno Awards (the Canadian equivalent of the Grammys) and reaching fans through nearly three years of Cardin’s touring. Finally, the Internet caught on. In January, her 2023 single “Feel Good” exploded on TikTok, amassing more than five million views. “Then French radio started playing it like crazy.” The song has remained at the top of the French charts for five months. “I’ve never had a moment like that with a song of mine,” she says.
Today, Cardin is back in the studio working on her third album, set to come out next year. Brando still produces most of her music—a mix of electronic-leaning pop hits and R&B ballads, sung by Cardin in her distinctive, smoky voice, in both English and French—and Schneider, her partner of more than a decade, remains her emotional anchor. “I’ve kept the same close circle for a really long time, and I’m proud of that,” she says. “That’s what really keeps me going in the harder times.”
Clara Molot is the Investigations Editor at AIR MAIL
