There’s a line sitting near the middle of Mint Castle that doesn’t announce itself. The song has been drifting up to that point, soft-edged and almost drowsy, and then: “remember that she’s dead inside.” It lands somewhere between a diagnosis and a confession, and then the song keeps moving, like it always knew the line was coming.
Mélissa Charbonneau Bisier doesn’t flinch when the subject comes up. “I write very instinctively, so I rarely overthink lyrics while they’re happening,” she says. “That line stayed because it disrupted the softness of the song in a way I liked.” She’s been drawn, across everything Ask Ophelia has done, to beauty sitting adjacent to something unsettling, the two things coexisting without one resolving the other. The line, she says, “evokes someone deeply shaped by unresolved trauma, someone who ends up poisoning the people around them without even realizing it.” The kind of damage that doesn’t know what it’s doing.
Mint Castle, released May 8, is the Montreal-based alternative rock band’s latest single, and the phrase at its centre took on meaning gradually. “The ‘mint castle’ started as this image of something pristine and safe on the surface,” Mélissa explains. “Almost too perfect. But the more I wrote, the more it became symbolic of emotional environments we inherit without questioning them.” What starts as an aesthetic image, clean and controlled and vaguely architectural, becomes something harder to look at. “Sometimes we stay inside something simply because it’s familiar, even if it’s slowly hurting us. The song lives in that blurry space between comfort and illusion.”
That blurriness is structural. The instrumentation hangs back. Guitars that could press forward don’t. The whole thing breathes at a pace that feels slightly off-kilter, too still for the weight it’s carrying. Mélissa describes being drawn to contrast in a specific way: “when the music feels almost comforting, but something underneath it doesn’t sit right. To me, that tension says more than if the song had been heavy all the way through.” The softness isn’t atmosphere layered over meaning. It is the meaning. “The core of the song is that everything is a façade.”
Ask Ophelia has been operating since 2020, initially as a solo writing project before evolving into a full band in early 2024 with the additions of Marc-Antoine Grisé on drums, Paul Nobert on bass and backing vocals, and Martine Desjardins on lead guitar. Mint Castle was already partially formed when the new lineup came in, one of the songs Mélissa had been carrying for a while. But carrying it alone and finishing it with the band turned out to be a different thing entirely. “The core of it was there, but bringing it into the band gave it a completely new shape. Everyone naturally brought something into it that expanded the emotional weight and atmosphere of the song without forcing it.”
What changed first, she says, was the chemistry. The collective instinct. “Those moments where everyone feels the song locking into place together.” There’s something in that image worth sitting with: a song about inherited emotional reality, about the slow cracking of an illusion, finding its final shape through the accumulated trust of people who hadn’t always been in the room.
Martine’s guitar work on the track is a good illustration of what that instinct sounds like in practice. It hovers at the edges, tracing the emotional perimeter of the song without pushing into it. There was no formal conversation about restraint. Everyone just understood. “There was this constant balance of trying not to make the guitar feel too dominant or too ‘expected,'” Mélissa says. “The song naturally leans into something emotional and almost bluesy at times, so it would’ve been easy to overplay or push it somewhere more stereotypical. Instead, a lot of the work came from pulling things back, reshaping parts, creating space, and protecting the fragility of the song.”
The band resists neat genre categorization, which in Montreal’s scene, crowded with punk and indie and heavy acts pulling in different directions, can read either as freedom or as a specific kind of rootlessness. Mélissa lands more on the former. “We usually describe ourselves as alternative rock because it gives us the freedom to pull from a lot of different influences without feeling boxed into one specific sound.” There are 90s alt-rock traces in Mint Castle if you’re listening for them, something in the melodic instincts, the way tension is held without being released cleanly. But she’s quick to say the references aren’t what drive it. “Emotional tension tends to matter more to us than genre itself.”
Ask Ophelia plays Pouzza Fest a week after the single drops, the kind of outdoor festival environment where quiet songs either collapse under the noise or find something they didn’t know they had. Mélissa seems less worried about the collision than curious about it. “Even in a louder or more chaotic environment like Pouzza, the song still carries that sense of restraint underneath. I actually think that contrast becomes even more interesting in that context.” A song about façades playing into a crowd that hasn’t heard it before, surrounded by bands who don’t sound anything like it.
The band is already working on a debut LP, and Mint Castle sits inside that larger frame without fully describing it. Some of what’s coming is heavier, darker, faster. “These songs were written over several years, so they’ve had time to evolve naturally alongside us as people and now as a band,” Mélissa says. The single is one emotional angle on a record that covers more territory.
“Mint Castle definitely feels connected to the larger world of the album.” She pauses, then says, “It’s going to be quite a journey.”
The guitars pull back. The line lands and the song keeps going. Something pristine on the surface, quietly toxic underneath, and the whole structure of the thing holding that tension in place, not resolving it.
Photos – Andres Amaya & Miguel de Plante
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