You many not have heard of her yet, but Mina Tindle’s name has been a feature on the independent Parisian music scene for a few years now. Behind the pseudonym is Pauline de Lassus, a 28-year-old Parisian with Spanish roots and a vagabond soul.

Die-hard Cat Power fan Mina Tindle came to music relatively late, at twenty, and gave her first live performance six years ago at the French equivalent of Glastonbury, the Eurockéennes. “I was working on organizing the winter festival,” she said. “The artistic directors knew that I composed, and they pushed me to get up on stage as a support act to Daniel Darc, with just four or five tracks. It was pretty wild! So I felt obliged to continue and take advantage of this great opportunity I’d been given.”
 

To carry many small things mina tindle taranta (BELIEVE DIGITAL) 2012 Listen

After her baptism of fire, Pauline moved to Brooklyn for a year on an internship as part of her studies. “Professionally, I was so bored. But I was living in Williamsburg (Ed’s note: trendy Brooklyn neighbourhood), above a rock club, and I used to listen to amazing bands there practically every night. That was when I started playing regularly on stage, and seriously thinking about making a career of it.”
 
Back in Paris, the young singer started working with different groups on the indie scene (Toy Fight, The Limes) and released her first single on the Sauvage Records label. The idea of an album was already taking root, and then in 2007, through MySpace, things really started moving when she met one of her teenage idols. JP Nataf, former singer with the Innocents, had been working solo since the group’s demise and working on projects with younger artists. “It was obviously a fantasy for me, but it was for him too. He saw me as some kind of rare pearl.”
 
After the mutual fascination period, the duo got down to work, taking almost two years to hone Tindle’s first album in a Parisian studio. “JP is extremely perfectionist and meticulous, and he sometimes has trouble winding up a project. It was not just about producing an album, he practically expected as much from me as he does from his own songs. There’s a lot of him in this album, actually.”  
 
The result, in English and French, is fourteen tracks of bright, ageless pop, at times verging on the ecstatic (Henry), whose minimal instrumentation (guitar and percussion) manages to sound incredibly dense, subtle and lively. One of the high points is the magnificent Pan, a French song imbued with the spirit of the ex-Innocents lead singer, with an edge of Beirut and the great Feist. French pop is alive, kicking and ready to run. 
 
Mina Tindle Taranta (Believe) 2012
Playing live on 6 April in Belfort, 14 April in Amiens & 9 May in Alençon.
 
Mina Tindle on Facebook (in French).
 
Translation: Anne-Marie Harper