Mentissa and the Art of Not Being Finished at Twenty

Paris – 18/07/2026: Sometimes, a song lasting barely three minutes is enough to reopen an entire phase of life. In its summer series on the new female voice in French-language pop, Franceinfo brought Mentissa’s “La Vingtaine” back to listeners’ attention on 17 July. The song, whose title can be translated as “The Twenties,” is not about the polished youth that advertising and social media like to sell, but about its more uncomfortable, more truthful core: uncertainty.

Mentissa asks how one describes oneself when one barely knows oneself. The Belgian-French singer portrays one’s twenties as an in-between state: you are expected to make decisions, devise plans for the future, appear composed and, preferably, be happy on the side. Yet beneath the rhythmically restrained pop surface is a voice that politely but firmly contradicts this programme. It wants to keep living before allowing itself to be definitively pinned down.

The song was released on 18 November 2022 on Mentissa’s debut album “La vingtaine”, on the Tôt ou tard label. It was written by Mentissa and Joseph Kamel; production was handled by Egil Franzen, Romain Descampe and Rémy Galichet. This very combination helps explain what is distinctive about the track: it does not seek the grand demonstrative gesture, but the precise form for a feeling familiar to many and yet rarely sung about with such little pathos.

In Mentissa’s song, one’s twenties are neither a mere promise nor a mere imposition. They are an age in which parties can feel like mandatory appointments, changing places can seem like salvation, and the question of the right life can sometimes sound like a particularly elegant trap. The French word “vingtaine” means more than a number of years; it refers to the diffuse period around the age of twenty, when a biography is still a draft and yet is already being judged.

Mentissa, who became known to a broad audience in 2021 with “Et bam”, has found a different tone in this piece from that of rapid self-assertion. Her heroine is not self-assured; she takes stock too early, doubts too thoroughly and above all wishes for a small reprieve. That is precisely where the song’s gentle radicalism lies: it defends the right not to have to become a finished person immediately.

The fact that Franceinfo is now featuring the track in a series about female singers and their new ways of storytelling is therefore more than a summery rediscovery. Four years after its release, “La Vingtaine” feels strikingly current because it neither turns uncertainty into therapy nor declares it a trend. Mentissa turns it into a pop moment that remains quiet and yet lingers: growing up, the song suggests, is less a destination than a temporary shelter.