Charlotte Cardin

Though she appeared to be taking the fast-track to fame by appearing on Québécois reality show La Voix in 2013 at age 18, Montreal’s Charlotte Cardin has revealed the full scope of her artistic vision gradually. A pair of EPs released over 2016 and 2017, Big Boy and Main Girl, showcased a young, bilingual singer/songwriter blessed with an undeniably old soul, situating her probing voice and frank lyrics in an atmospheric, after-hours milieu of piano-bar jazz and trip-hop beats. It would be a few more years before Cardin delivered her first album-length statement with 2021’s Phoenix, an album that triangulates the belt-it-out balladry of Adele, the soft-rock smoothness of Fleetwood Mac, and the arty textures of Radiohead. But as she’s grown bolder musically, her lyrical voice has also turned more brazen—through sassy singles like “Passive Aggressive” and “Sad Girl,” she’s not wallowing in the aftermath of breakups, but reveling in the freedom they bring. As she sings on the latter track, “I gotta tell you, all my best songs I wrote the week you left/I got an album from this f*cking mess.” Or, as she put it to Apple Music: “I’m a Scorpio,” she says, “so I find a lot of joy in a sweet revenge song, I must say!”