2 hours ago
1
The making of CMAT’s third album was a fraught business. Holed up in New York, writing and recording the follow-up to 2023’s Crazymad, for Me – which, despite critical acclaim and a Mercury nomination, was pronounced unsatisfactory by the singer herself – Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson suffered what sounds like a pretty terrifying breakdown. “I started actually hallucinating,” she said earlier this year. “I didn’t realise for the first two months that was what was happening, but I basically imagined the entire apartment I was staying in was crawling with insects … I went to the doctor and showed him my bites, and he said: ‘Those are stress hives; you’re mental.’”
One assumes that wasn’t exactly what he said, but you get the gist. And yet, despite its author comparing its recording to “a toxic relationship”, Euro-Country does not sound like it was challenging to make. On the contrary: it sounds like the supremely assured work of a songwriter whose powers have reached a new peak. It is, by turns, poignant, moving, furiously angry, uproariously funny and packed with incredible tunes. It strides confidently away from the country-infused style she minted on her 2022 debut If My Wife New I’d Be Dead, into territory that touches on jazz (Janis Joplining), raging alt-rock (The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station) and soul-kissed pop (Running/ Planning; Take a Sexy Picture of Me) without losing the essence of what made her successful in the first place.
Listen to her break the fourth wall during The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station, with a cry of “this is making no sense to the average listener”; pause her description of a collapsing relationship on When a Good Man Cries to castigate herself for being “the people’s mess, the Dunboyne Diana”; or deliver an opening as wait-what? as that of Lord, Let That Tesla Crash (“I heard death comes in threes / I misheard it, being from Dublin / I thought ‘death’s in the trees’ / Which makes sense because they’re the saddest cunts of plants”). Again and again, you’re struck by the sense that this could be the work of no one else.
Before its release, Thompson expressed concern that the album’s socio-political bent would be read as “incredibly cringe and incredibly earnest”, but she needn’t have worried. A masterclass in addressing serious topics with a light, witty touch, and in allying her lyrics to hook-laden, undeniable melodies, Euro-Country addressed body-shaming, mental health, Irish identity and the iniquities of late-stage capitalism (“All the mooching around shops,” as she put it, “and the lack of identity”) without ever causing the listener to feel they were being lectured.
It managed to interrogate the human cost of the 2008 financial crisis in Ireland – on a title track that featured references to mythical Irish warrior Cú Chulainn and Kerry Katona in the same line – and provoke a viral TikTok dance craze, promoted by Chicken Shop Date’s Amelia Dimoldenberg and actor Julia Fox, among others: by any metric, quite an achievement. It also informed a showstopping Glastonbury performance that felt like an infectious explosion of faintly chaotic joy.
Thompson has described Euro-Country as “the most important album I’ve made”, and as the end of something: “breaking up with an old version of myself”. Understandably, she doesn’t “want to make another record where I’m self-flagellating for three months in a fucking weird apartment in New York and there’s imaginary insects crawling everywhere”. In that interview, she wondered aloud whether songwriting was a sustainable occupation for her; whether seeking treatment for her mental health might cause the flow of songs to stop. Whatever the future holds for CMAT, Euro-Country is a high-water mark in her career, and in pop music in 2025. It’s the triumphant work of an artist who seems out there on her own, completely inimitable: proof of the power of forging your own unique identity in a climate where the cookie-cutter too often prevails.
