Mothball the cardigans, fluff the feathers, and zhuzh the tulle. lowercase is OVER. It’s all names in lights now. Letters 10 feet high, blazing wattage, full razzle dazzle. The showgirl was back even before Earth’s most famous fiancée ordained it in her new album title: extroverted triple threats hitting every single base, their turbo charisma shaking off the fetid blanket of the pandemic years and smashing through flattened platform hell. Add CMAT to their number. The Irish musician born Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson is a born entertainer: a ham, a wit, a diva who pioneered the bold art of bum cleavage at last year’s BRIT awards. Awe-struck critics have deemed her every cheeky festival performance this summer a heist, a runaway bolt for the big leagues after several years on the slow burn.
A while before “going Nashville” became pop’s default, CMAT was making her name on showstopping Celtic country numbers. In her early 20s, she was depressed, recently single, working as a nightclub shots girl, and trying and failing to make hyperpop to indulge her Charli obsession. She suddenly found her focus by writing the tearcatcher “I Wanna Be a Cowboy, Baby!” “And I feel bad, ’cause I didn’t cry/When someone I grew up with died/But I break down every time I’m on the scales,” she sang, minting her knack for self-aware tragedy, and, in its swaying chorus, for classic melodies. “Cowboy” was the highlight of her 2022 debut, If My Wife New I’d Be Dead. A year later, Crazymad, for Me upped the hit rate with the brilliantly blousy John Grant collaboration “Where Are Your Kids Tonight?” and jaunty fiddle kiss-off “Have Fun!” These songs showed an artist who had the voice of a barmaid Adele, the rhinestone cool of latter-day Jenny Lewis, and comedic chops all her own. “Huh, silly bitch, woo!” she trills in “Have Fun!”, realizing what a sucker she was for giving her ex all her cash.
Her third album in four years, EURO-COUNTRY, is the first to fully realize CMAT’s poly-threat potential. The songwriting packs a new punch and a ferocious sense of yearning. It mixes so many layers—humor, devastation, irrational rage at seeing celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s face everywhere, politics, a distinct Irishness that has nothing to do with Claddagh rings and splitting the G—and pretty much nails them all.
CMAT coined the title EURO-COUNTRY as a literal descriptor of her sound, a reference to her home country, which became one of the first nations to adopt the Euro currency, in January 1999, and to how capitalism breeds isolation. This is an almost impossible needle to thread, and the title track (and first proper song) does it beautifully. It works at surface level as a sweeping ballad, the bittersweet chorus of “my Euro-Euro-Euro-country” serving both as a tribute and a lament. This huge song also reveals CMAT as a master of lyrical economy as she outlines the impact of growing up through the “Celtic Tiger” period of rapid economic growth in the late ’90s, when Ireland was transformed into a wealthy nation thanks in part to foreign investment and low corporate taxes. It didn’t last: It collapsed during the financial crash, leaving a trail of destruction. In a few brief, matter-of-fact lines, CMAT covers how colonization and globalized ambitions stripped away Irish identity; how political corruption and financial failure blighted the country with unfinished “ghost” housing estates and an epidemic of male suicides: “I was 12 when the das started killing themselves all around me,” she sings. The song bears so much weight and tells us exactly who she is: “And no one says it out loud,” she sings, “but I know it can be better if we hound it.”
EURO-COUNTRY is rich with disappointment, but it never stops CMAT looking for something better, from herself and the world. She shows you how good it could be in the insane opening run of songs that follow the title track. “When a Good Man Cries” showcases what a characterful singer she is, defeated then blazing, in a furiously soulful, Celtic-tinged middle eight, as she castigates herself for becoming the thing she hated. (“The people’s mess/Dunboyne Diana,” is classic CMAT, nodding to her hometown.) “The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station” builds like a rickety piano being dragged behind a speeding truck as she grapples with why the naked chef has become the target of her pointless loathing, and reminds herself, in a fantastically terraces-worthy shouted chorus, “OK! Don’t be a bitch! The man’s got kids and they wouldn’t like this!” “Tree Six Foive” darkens into a brisk, beautifully orchestrated (and line dancing-primed) rejection of “the man who was embarrassed by me when the clock struck 12” one New Year’s Eve.
And in “Take a Sexy Picture of Me,” she gets the last laugh over the bottom-feeders who made such awful comments about her appearance on a BBC livestream that the broadcaster had to suspend them. Winsome country soul with a little Winehouse in its wiggle, it’s an enticingly light-touch run through a lifetime of trying to live up to impossible standards, from being “9 years old, tryna wax my legs with tape” to being seen by men as washed up at 27. In lesser hands, the sentiment would thud like an Etsy slogan mug on an “I woke up like this” coaster. In CMAT’s, contorting yourself to please others becomes the perfectly silly and comically tragic nursery rhyme “I did the butcher/I did the baker/I did the home and the family maker,” complete with a splendid little dance that made the song a deserved TikTok smash.
EURO-COUNTRY mellows out a little after this point, dwelling on alienation and the sense of moving through life as a non-player character, in lovely, largely acoustic songs that can’t hope to hit as hard as the album’s first half. It peaks again when CMAT digs beyond old anxieties of being 23, when “everyone is having fun except for me” (“Coronation Street”), to observe herself unsparingly. The raw, spotlit “Lord, Let That Tesla Crash” remembers a late friend who she can’t let herself miss because “my memories are loaded with what I wanted/But I couldn’t have with you,” so she fixates her pain on the showy car parked outside their old place instead. And “Running/Planning” should have been the closer (over the epilogue-like jazz club oddity “Janis Joplining”), a devastated portrait of a relationship she knew could never be, imagining a news chevron telling everyone “that I’m not good enough for you.” The chorus of “I keep on running, planning, running, planning” builds from a gutting mantra that tries to keep its cool, to a yell, furious that no amount of scheming could ever be enough.
It gets at one of the beautiful paradoxes of EURO-COUNTRY: the dissonance in listening to CMAT’s songs detailing her self-doubt and perceived insufficiencies compared to the confidence and verve she delivers them with. It’s a lonely album with a whopping heart, a hungry siren call for connection. “Ready” says it best: another gorgeous yearner, this time unpicking the lie that a woman must mercilessly improve herself before she dares to show the world her face. Who needs perfection when you can stick on a few tooth gems and a ritzy outfit? Like any true showgirl, CMAT makes you believe transcendence is possible as long as the spotlight and sequins are on.
