September 3, 2026 |
As soon as she walked into the room, Charlotte Cardin seemed to caress the space with a velvet touch. Her presence felt gravitational, like everything instinctively shifted towards her, making it hard to do anything other than watch her glide around 10‘s East London set – yet there was never anything performative about it.
from left: SAINT LAURENT by ANTHONY VACCARELLO, MIU MIU
Gracious, passionate and curious, she was just as interested in learning about me (a fellow Canadian) as I was about her, which felt refreshing for someone who’s quietly become one of the biggest Francophone artists in the world. Smooth jazz sounds drifted through at her politely communicated request and as she posed atop a grand piano dressed in Saint Laurent, Givenchy and McQueen, the room felt at ease around her.
We caught up again a few days later, shortly after the release of her emotionally charged new single, Take Me Back. This time, Cardin is calling from her studio in Montreal, where she’s putting the finishing touches on the album she’ll release in January. It’s been a remarkable run for the Canadian singer-songwriter. Her addictive, 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. Back in February, she was named Female Artist of the Year at France’s prestigious Victoires de la Musique awards (placing her among only a handful of French-Canadian women to receive the honour, including Céline Dion in 1995) after Billboard Canada crowned her Global Woman of the Year in 2025. Add more than a billion streams across her catalogue and it’s safe to say that Cardin’s star is still rising – though speaking to her, you would never know it. She sounds far more excited about finally finishing the record she’s been living with than listing off career milestones.
Born in Montreal and now splitting her time between her hometown and Paris, the Québécois musician has been belting it out since she was old enough to speak. She remembers her mother singing soft lullabies while she was still in the cot. Her grandma, a music teacher, would gather everyone around the piano after dinner, playing Quebec folklore songs while Cardin’s vocally gifted grandpa harmonised and the rest of the family joined in. Looking back, it’s those moments she credits with shaping her relationship with music. “Music was a way of bringing us together and I’m really grateful that I got to grow up in that kind of environment,” she says.
MCQUEEN
At home, music wasn’t simply encouraged – it was expected. Both of Cardin’s parents are scientists, but they insisted she and her sister, Camille, now a journalist, learn an instrument. Xylophone came first for her, then piano (“I never practised, I didn’t like it very much”), before her mother convinced a seven-year-old Cardin to take singing lessons instead (she re-taught herself piano as a young adult). “She was like, ‘You love to sing, you have a beautiful voice’, and I thought it would be fun.” Around age eight or nine, she switched to a new teacher and now, more than 20 years later, she’s still training with that very same vocal coach, Mireille, who insisted on giving her a classical foundation despite knowing exactly where her heart lay. “I knew from the start that I wanted to sing pop songs,” Cardin says. “But she was like, ‘I want you to have a classical formation… and then you can apply it to pop music.'”
That technical grounding became the backbone of her smoky, jazz-tinged and remarkably controlled voice. Her vocals carry a maturity that makes even the simplest lyric land with emotional weight. Trying to pin her sound down, however, is harder than she makes it look. Ask Cardin herself and she will shrug off any temptation to overcomplicate things. “I make pop music,” she says. Pop, yes – but brushed with jazz, electronic production, flashes of rock and the influence of chanson française.
from left: MAISON MARGIELA, SAINT LAURENT by ANTHONY VACCARELLO
Those influences were never confined to a single source. Her father, a self-confessed rock obsessive, filled family road trips with tracks by Led Zeppelin, Prince, Jimi Hendrix and The Rolling Stones, while her mother leaned towards French and Québécois singer-songwriters. Then it would be Cardin and her sister’s turn, opting for a bit of Beyoncé or Céline. “We would go from listening to Stevie Ray Vaughan to Britney Spears,” she says with a laugh. “Growing up in that kind of environment… I always associated very joyful moments with music.”
Jazz, meanwhile, became something she discovered for herself rather than inherited from home. It’s where she found many of the voices she returns to today, from Nina Simone and Billie Holiday to Ella Fitzgerald. “I find that some of the greatest vocalists of all time are jazz singers,” she says. “There’s a warmth and a nostalgia in jazz that touches my heart in a unique way.”
The same fascination with emotional nuance spills over into almost everything else she consumes. When we speak, she’s slowly making her way through Douglas Stuart‘s Booker Prize-winning 2020 novel Shuggie Bain, admitting it’s “so beautiful” but that the Glaswegian tale of a boy growing up with his alcoholic mother is so emotionally heavy she can only read it in small doses. More recently, she’s become obsessed with the Spanish TV series Los Años Nuevos, which follows the same couple over 10 New Year’s Eves. It’s exactly the sort of storytelling she’s drawn to. “I’m very attracted to realistic relationships between people,” she says. “I love when it’s a little bit complicated and very nuanced… when the characters are flawed, but you still get attached to them.” It’s hardly surprising that those same qualities find their way into her songwriting.
MAISON MARGIELA
Originally, music wasn’t even supposed to be the plan. Cardin wanted to be a doctor, putting her pre-med studies on hold to compete on La Voix – Canada’s version of The Voice – in 2013, where she finished fourth. That exposure led to a feature on the French-Canadian singer Garou‘s track Du Vent des Mots, then Cardin made her first EP Big Boy in 2016, before her debut album Phoenix in 2021 transformed her into one of Canada’s most celebrated new artists, winning Album of the Year at the Junos (the country’s version of the Grammys). Two years later, her sophomore record, 2023’s 99 Nights, pushed her even further onto the international stage, racking up critical acclaim.
Ask most people when Cardin’s breakthrough arrived, though, and they’ll point to Feel Good. The singer, however, is reluctant to call it a breakthrough at all. “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.”
If Feel Good marked the end of one chapter, Take Me Back feels like the beginning of another. The single arrived with a cinematic video directed by the Oscar-nominated Québécois filmmaker Vincent René-Lortie, shot across Sicily’s serene landscapes. Rather than telling a straightforward story, it leans into symbolism – power shifts, crashing waves and the slow, creeping feeling that some decisions just can’t be undone. At its core, though, the song is heartbreakingly simple. “It’s about wanting the option to leave,” Cardin says, “and then once you get that option… all you want is permission to return.”
HERMES
GUCCI
The concept for the video came together naturally. Cardin had already imagined waking up on a mysterious beach, picking up where her previous video, The Way We Touch, left off. René-Lortie built from there, creating an island where masculine power structures are quietly disrupted as Cardin arrives. The ever-growing wave running through the film became a metaphor for the emotional inevitability of the song itself. “I really liked that because I think the feeling that I wanted to represent with the song was an inevitable [end] to a relationship that you sometimes just can’t stop hearing in your head.”
Like much of her output, Take Me Back begins with something deeply personal before slowly drifting into fiction. Cardin rarely writes diary entries set to music. Instead, she starts with a feeling, then follows wherever it leads. “I’ll start from a spark that’s very close to my real life,” she says. “There is a mix of fiction and reality in my songs. Not everything I sing about is 100 per cent true… I love using my imagination to tell stories that aren’t necessarily mine.”
Working bilingually adds yet another layer. She oscillates between English and the language of love with the ease of a prima ballerina performing a pirouette, but each unlocks a different side of her personality. French, she says, carries a softness she can’t quite recreate elsewhere, while 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.”
SAINT LAURENT by ANTHONY VACCARELLO
Living between Montreal and Paris allows for a rhythm that’s become second nature over the past few years. Moving to France wasn’t simply about career progression, although creatively it opened doors. After spending most of her life in Montreal, she craved fresh surroundings, new collaborators and the feeling of starting again. “I just needed to expand my horizons a little bit,” she says.
Even so, Montreal remains home in every meaningful sense. Her creative team is based there, her family are nearby and, when she isn’t recording, she’s happiest wandering around Mile End with a coffee from Olimpico before settling into a park with a crossword. She’s not particularly interested in clubs or late nights, preferring a good wine bar in Paris or dinner with family back in the True North.
With the album arriving this autumn, she went back on the road with European summer festival dates, with plans to return to the UK, the US and Canada for more. More than anything, she’s excited to finally share these songs with the audiences who have been waiting since 99 Nights. Looking back at the version of herself who first stepped onto the La Voix stage more than a decade ago, her advice is surprisingly uncomplicated. “I think I would tell myself that it takes time,” she says. “Trust the process… the process is the best part of it.” That idea permeates everything she does.
Spending time with Charlotte Cardin, it’s difficult not to feel that’s exactly how she’s built her career. While so much of the music industry chases immediacy, she’s embraced the slow burn instead by letting each record, performance and chapter arrive exactly when it’s ready. Judging by everything that’s happened in her life over the past year, it seems that she was right to trust the process.
10 Magazine Issue 77 – FUTURE, LEGACY, HERITAGE – is out on newsstands September 18. Pre-order your copy here.
MAIN GIRL
Photographer MARCO CELLA
Fashion Editor TOBY GRIMDITCH
Talent CHARLOTTE CARDIN
Text EMILY PHILLIPS
Hair HIROSHI MATSUSHITA using Oribe Hair Care
Make-up EMMA MILES at Caren Agency using Prada Beauty
Manicurist HAYLEY EVANS-SMITH at Debbie Jones Management using Nailberry
Photographer’s assistant ALINE BLOCMAN
Fashion assistants FI MUNDAY and CECILIA NUVOLA BECHINI
Set designer ISABELLA FURNESS
Set designer’s assistants CLAUDIA ROSE and SUZANNE ELVEN
Production SONYA MAZURYK
from left: PRADA, DIOR
