Mina Tindle, the project of Parisian singer/songwriter Pauline De Lassus, has announced the release of her first body of work in six years with her new album SISTER, her third full-length due out October 9, 2020 via 37d03d. 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. The album was mostly made in New York City with producer Thomas Bartlett (Joan as Police Woman, Yoko Ono, Florence + the Machine), with additional production by Sufjan Stevens and Bryce Dessner.

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.” And with “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.

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. “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.”