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New Sounds: Charlotte Cardin pushes her way to the front on ‘Main Girl’

Charlotte Cardin, for one, is through with finishing second.

Fresh off the release of her newest EP, the Montreal songstress refuses to be anything but your “Main Girl” on her six-track collection of defiant jazz-pop fusion songs. Cardin dropped Main Girl last week (September 6) just before digging into her September tour with Nick Murphy (f.k.a. Chet Faker), which hits Royale in Boston on September 18.

“‘Main Girl’ is an ode to independence,” Cardin says via Atlantic Records. “It is the empowerment of knowing that you deserve a good relationship. It’s the realization that you’re better off alone than not being someone else’s priority, it’s never accepting to come second.”

The EP ropes in three songs from her 2016 debut release, Big Boy, and offers three new tunes, including “Paradise Motion” and “The Kids.”

Perhaps her new steely disposition stems from the aftermath of the relationship behind her breakthrough song “Like It Doesn’t Hurt,” a stirring r&b duet with rapper Husser that she released last year.

“You drag me in your dirt, oh/Like it doesn’t hurt, no,” she pleads on the tune, seemingly beat into complete submission. While the song makes an appearance on Cardin’s new EP, she’s since shed that rather helpless mentality and done a sharp 180 on her approach to love.

“I was a fool to love you,” she chimes in on the title track, “A fool to love the pain.”

Talk about solid character development.

“I can hear how my songwriting has grown when I listen to it,” Cardin adds. “That’s been really cool. The EP is the first real proof of what I’ve done and I can see my whole journey of what I went through to get there. It’s amazing to hear how I evolved throughout the songs and I hope to continue to do so.”

Peep Cardin’s newfound resilience on the title track below.

Featured photo by Gaëlle Leroyer, courtesy of Atlantic Records.