I was there for the headliner, Kneecap, but it was CMAT who stole the afternoon. It was a gloriously sunny afternoon and with a few gin and tonics softening the edges of the day, I found myself on a grassy hill listening to an Irish woman singing about wanting to be a cowboy, baby! I remember thinking how unexpectedly captivating her voice and lyrics were.
Kneecap were, of course, brilliant that night, but for me, the real highlight of the festival was CMAT.
The musician CMAT — Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson — is truly the next big thing, one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Irish music and a hilarious person to boot. She’s a born entertainer, a diva in the best and boldest sense of the word, a brilliant songwriter whose lyrics mix irony and sincerity to create songs that are funny, tragic, and deeply relatable all at once.
Who else can make a song about the ubiquity of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver — "That man should not have his face on posters" — so deeply existential and relatable, a ballad to the suffocating weight of social unease and financial precarity?
Later in her adult life she moved to Manchester with her then-boyfriend to try making music (in a duo called Bad Sea), but that relationship proved toxic and stifling; eventually she broke away, returned to Dublin, and began self-releasing her own music.
CMAT’s debut studio album, If My Wife New I’d Be Dead, released in February 2022, landed at #1 on the Irish Albums Chart and earned strong reviews. She went on to release Crazymad, for Me in October 2023, a break-up record of sorts, penned from the perspective of a future version of CMAT (at 47 years old) time-travelling back to prevent a relationship that she says "ruined her life."
Again, the album received wide critical acclaim and won CMAT her first Mercury Prize nomination.
CMAT’s third studio album, Euro-Country, was released in late August. It’s a sprawling, ambitious album; I’ve listened to it more times than I can possibly count, and with each listen I find something new to appreciate.
Euro-Country pairs pop-country hooks with lyrics that swing between humour and confession, between grief and absurdity, mixing joy, devastation, political commentary, and pop culture.
There’s a glorious array of songs on this album. "I waited for love / With a cricket bat," CMAT croons in the opening lines of When a Good Man Cries, a slow-burning lament with Fleetwood Mac-esque vocal layering and a charming fiddle melody.
On Take a Sexy Picture of Me, CMAT recalls how she was "nine years old tryna wax [her] legs with tape" in a childlike bid for "sexiness"—an experience many women can relate to (I still remember the absolute bloodbath when I first tried to shave my legs at the tender age of 11).
In Coronation St, meanwhile, CMAT sings about waiting for her life to start: "I’m twenty-three and everyone is having fun except for me." There’s a bleakness to her lyrics that belies the up-beat, poppy, wall-of-sound production.
At the core of Euro-Country is the notion of Irishness, but not that represented by Mr Tayto, pints of Guinness, shamrocks, or claddagh rings.
For CMAT, Ireland is a complex and fractured nation, a country both shaped and scarred by capitalism, the Eurozone, and the legacies of colonialism. On the eponymous track, CMAT recalls being 12 when "the da’s started killing themselves all around me" in the wake of the Celtic Tiger collapse.
In just a few lines, she deftly sketches out the arc from boom to bust, from speculative housing estates to ghost towns, and the quiet devastation left behind. The album’s cover nods to the fetishised vision of Irishness — it depicts CMAT as Gerome’s Truth Coming Out of Her Well, not in a mythic landscape but in a Dunboyne shopping centre fountain, Gaelic script and all.
My favourite track on the album is Lord, Let That Tesla Crash, though I’m almost embarrassed to admit how much it gets to me. Despite the wry title, the song is less an indictment of Musk’s empire than a beautiful, messy, elegy for a former housemate who died.
What makes this song so authentic is the way CMAT’s grief resists easy sentimentality. Instead, she sings "I don’t miss you like I should," her pain and regret manifesting as fury directed at the Tesla owner who has commandeered their old home.
Listening to Euro-Country, I get the sense that CMAT has carved out a space entirely her own. She tackles the bleakness and absurdity of modern life with humour and heart; she’s simultaneously glamorous and grounded, satirical and sincere.
CMAT sings about her insecurities and self-doubt with a paradoxical swagger and vitality — her sad songs are glittery, punchy, and perfect for belting out in the shower. She’s unafraid to speak her mind and the resulting album is raw, authentic, and so much fun.
Next March, instead of stumbling across CMAT by chance, I’ll be at her UK tour with my cousin Eilish.
Taking our cue from CMAT herself, we’ll be dressed as cowgirls, unapologetically ourselves, and belting out every word. Yeehaw!
— Jean Balchin is an ODT columnist who has started a new life in Edinburgh.
