Mina Tindle

Bio

The third full-length from Mina Tindle, SISTER is an album populated by mythic creatures of all kinds: lions on parade, lovers turned to cannibals, kings and Sirens and women with wings. Like any great fabulist, she threads her storytelling with a fragile wisdom, revealing essential truths about all the danger and wildness within the human heart. With each moment elevated by her spellbinding vocal work—a gift she’s shown in recording and touring as a singer for The National—SISTER ultimately makes for a transportive listening experience, at turns impossibly dreamlike and profoundly illuminating.

Mina Tindle is the project of Parisian singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Pauline De Lassus. “With my first two records I was on a quest, searching for the meaning of life and love and absolutely everything, but in making this album I felt much more grounded,” says De Lassus, who notes that becoming a mother closely informed her songwriting on SISTER. “Instead of feeling nostalgic for the past or worried about the future, I’m living more fully in the present, and it makes all the colors feel deeper and more contrasted than they were before.”

In a departure from the radiant alt-pop of De Lassus’ first two albums, SISTER brings that depth and contrast to a more heavily contoured yet beautifully nuanced sonic backdrop. Mostly made in New York City with producer Thomas Bartlett (Joan as Police Woman, Yoko Ono, Florence + the Machine), the album’s elegantly detailed sound reflects both De Lassus’ rich interiority and the enchanted nature of her recording environment. “While we were working Thomas played all these movies on a big screen with the sound off, like Werner Herzog films and animal documentaries,” she recalls. “It felt like we were creating the soundtrack to a movie, and I think it helped to make this album more visual and coherent than anything I’ve done before.”

Throughout SISTER, Mina Tindle eclipses the odd magic of the songs with a fierce emotional realism, embodying every feeling with untold sensitivity. Written and produced by Sufjan Stevens (whom she joined on tour in 2015), “Give a Little Love” channels intense lonesomeness and longing, its soulful melancholy magnified by Stevens’s warm background vocals. On “Belle Pénitence,” she shares a tender love letter to her husband (The National’s Bryce Dessner), twisting the track’s mood of lovely surrender with some fantastically brutal hunting imagery rendered in her native tongue. And on “Lions,” with its silken rhythms and shimmering grooves, De Lassus offers up a bit of soft-hearted encouragement in the face of self-doubt: “If the roads are made for a parade/Go march with the lions.” She adds, “The idea is that you need to keep going, even if sometimes you feel like you’re just pretending to be brave. It’s all about the march.”

Elsewhere on SISTER, De Lassus hints at the literary fascinations that spark much of her songwriting, presenting two tracks inspired by Italo Calvino’s story collection Under the Jaguar Sun: “Indian Summer” (a tale of rediscovered sensuality and unintended cannibalism) and the sweetly lilting “Louis.” “It’s the story of a king who’s so paranoid about someone taking his throne, he develops the ability to hear every single sound in the castle,” she says of the latter. “One day he wakes up and realizes he’s lost the love of his life, because he’s so obsessed with holding onto his power.”

After the gloriously sprawling “Triptyque”— a ten-minute epic partly written with Dessner — SISTER closes out with a stark rendition of “Is Anything Wrong” by Lhasa De Sela, the late singer/songwriter whom De Lassus names among her most enduring influences. Mina Tindle’s version of ‘Is Anything Wrong’ originally featured as part of a large tribute to the late singer that she conceived and organized in 2019 with another of her longtime heroes Canadian singer Leslie Feist. They would later perform the tribute at London’s Barbican and the Cork Opera House.

A work of both extraordinary subtlety and storybook grandeur, SISTER expands on the graceful musicality first displayed on her 2012 full-length debut with Taranta, produced with famed French songwriter JP Nataf. The album drew critical acclaim from outlets like Pitchfork and her French language single ‘Pan’ achieved widespread success at French Radio as well as regular play-listing at international stations such as Los Angeles’s KCRW. Soon after wrapping up more than two years of touring in support of Taranta, she returned with her 2014 sophomore effort, the critically-acclaimed Parades, produced by Olivier Marguerit. De Lassus later appearing as a featured soloist on The National’s 2019 album I Am Easy to Find and toured extensively with the band. During the last few years as she was writing and recording SISTER, De Lassus and her Mina Tindle project have also been an integral part of the PEOPLE Festivals at the historic Berlin Funkhaus in 2016 and 2018, where she worked with a vast range of musicians and artists in the community.

As De Lassus’ first body of work in six years, SISTER achieves a potent complexity, arriving as her most imaginative selection of songs to date while wholly embracing the sometimes-painful truth-telling she’s long treasured in her most beloved artists. “When I listen to someone like Lhasa de Sela, I’m so struck by the purity of her words—she doesn’t bullshit, and the songs just go straight to your heart,” she says. “All the people I love the most have this beautiful way of singing their truth, and I hope these songs give that same kind of honesty.”