Mentana

A couple, a band and a film credit

Mentana began in Montréal in 2010 around two people who were already a couple and are now married. Robin-Joël Cool grew up in Tracadie-Sheila, on the north-eastern coast of New Brunswick. Viviane Audet was born in Maria, on the Quebec side of the Baie des Chaleurs, in November 1981. He sings in a gravelled voice and plays acoustic guitar and harmonica; she plays piano and Wurlitzer and takes the higher vocal line. By the time of their most recent album they had been together seventeen years.

The band's first wide exposure came from a film rather than a release. Islands and Rupees ran over the closing credits of Rafaël Ouellet's Camion in 2012, and the score Audet and Cool wrote for that film, with Erik West-Millette, took the Prix Iris for best original music in 2013. West-Millette has since become a member of the band itself, playing electric, upright and slide bass, with Yannick Parent on drums and percussion. That four-piece line-up has held steady through the current cycle.

The scoring job that became the day job

Cool and Audet have written more than thirty scores for film and television, and the habits of that work are audible in the band: arrangements built around space, instruments chosen for colour rather than convention, songs that behave like scenes with a beginning and an end rather than verse-chorus machines.

Both also act and both have separate catalogues. Cool has appeared in 19-2, in Xavier Dolan's Mommy in 2014 and in District 31, and won a Gémeaux for best lead actor in a comedy series for his role as Stéphane in Temps de chien; he also took a Canadian Folk Music Award in 2018. Audet has released records under her own name since Le Long jeu in 2006, through Les Filles montagnes in 2020 and Les Nuits avancent comme des camions blindés sur les filles in 2023, and more recently the instrumental Le piano et le torrent.

Twelve years of singing in English

Mentana's first three records were in English and sat in the folk-americana field rather than the Quebec chanson one. Western Soil, a self-produced EP, arrived in 2014. Inland Desire followed in 2016, produced by Leon Louder. Rise From the Wreck came in 2022 with Philippe Brault producing.

It was a coherent run and it earned the band an audience, but it kept them at a slight angle to the francophone industry they live inside. The fourth record resolved that, and it did so almost by accident.

Eight days at the Vieux Treuil

The catalyst was a television job. Cool plays Stéphane in Temps de chien, the series led by François Bellefeuille, and wrote its music; during the shoot he wrote a festive French-language song called J'veux du homard. By his own account the song gave him the appetite to play music in French, and he describes it as the moment he accepted who he is.

What followed was a band holiday that turned into an album. Mentana decamped to Au Vieux Treuil, the long-standing venue in Havre-Aubert on the Îles-de-la-Madeleine, and recorded twelve songs in eight days, playing live in the room. Everything bar John et John was cut there. Around twenty guest musicians came through, drawn from the Islands, New Brunswick, Gaspésie, Prince Edward Island and Louisiana, among them the fiddlers Pascal Miousse, Jean-Denis Bourque and Félix Leblanc. Ghyslain Luc Lavigne engineered and shares the production credit with Cool and the band; Marc Thériault mastered it at Le Lab.

Les Frolics was released on 12 September 2025 through Let Artists Be: forty-four minutes, twelve tracks. The title refers to the Acadian frolic, a communal work party that ends in a dance, and the record is built to that shape. The subject matter is not uniformly light — clear-cutting in the forests around Cool's home town sits alongside astronomy, and the closing Comme l'a dit Sagan is the reflective piece on the record. Lady Sherbrooke leans on a Greek bouzouki and on Audet's baleinophone, an organ made with whale bone. Reviewing it for Le Canal Auditif, Philippe Dompierre gave the album 7.5 out of 10 and picked out the three fiddlers for particular credit.

Where they stand in October 2026

A year on from release, the record has done what the English albums did not: it has put Mentana on the ADISQ list. They are up at the 2026 galas in album of the year – folk, for Les Frolics, and in group or duo of the year. Speaking to Le Quotidien on 12 October 2026, Audet said the nominations left them with the feeling of arriving somewhere. Cool framed it more bluntly, saying the ADISQ had always looked like something reserved for the bigger acts, and crediting the move into French, and a lighter touch, with changing how visible the band is.

Neither member has cleared the diary for the band. Audet is touring Le piano et le torrent, co-hosts a second season of Piano public and is due to appear in STAT in the winter. Cool has television work in Bon Cop Bad Cop and in Libre dès maintenant. Mentana runs alongside all of it rather than replacing it, which is part of why the tour is spread thinly over eighteen months rather than packed into a season.

A tour that runs to spring 2027

The Les Frolics show played the Francos de Montréal at Studio TD on 18 June 2026 and then opened an extended run of theatre dates. The autumn leg took in Palace de Granby on 16 October 2026 — drummer Yannick Parent's home town — and the Salle Octave-Crémazie at the Grand Théâtre de Québec on 17 October, with two support slots for Styx in Quebec City and Laval on 24 and 26 October. November and December bring L'Anglicane in Lévis on the 12th, La Pocatière on the 13th, Théâtre des Muses in Laval on the 21st, Le Domaine Forget at Saint-Irénée on 3 December, Châteauguay on the 5th and Shawinigan on the 11th.

The 2027 half opens at the Cabaret Théâtre du vieux Saint-Jean in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu on 22 January and continues through Longueuil on 18 February and 20 March, Montmagny on 19 February, Rivière-du-Loup on 17 March, Cabano on the 18th, Lac-Mégantic on the 25th, two nights at the Théâtre du Marais in Val-Morin on 27 and 28 March, and Saguenay on 1 April. Every date is in Quebec. Tickets sit around $45 to $49, with a $35 student rate in Québec, where the evening show was down to fewer than forty seats in the week before it played.