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.”
