It’s every artist’s dream to make it big and to have their work mean something to people. However, one byproduct of success, Irish singer CMAT is learning, is that one’s art becomes fodder for news. And with news comes thinkpieces.
Hours before we hop on a Zoom, the 29-year-old singer (born Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson) released the lead single for her third studio album, Euro-Country. CMAT has always been outspoken in her music, her songs regularly lambasting the patriarchy. (When she faced online vitriol and body-shaming after Radio 1’s Big Weekend festival in 2024, she penned the biting “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” about performing sexuality to suit men’s desires.) But with the blatantly political “Euro-Country”—a bilingual Irish and English track that references colonization, corruption, suicide, and her home country’s identity crisis following the 2008 economic crash—she enters new territory.
“It’s in the news, which is not something I’m used to. People are using me as a talking point,” she says. “So to have now released a political song, I feel like I’ve just been fed to the wolves. My manager rang me this morning and was like, ‘Don’t go on Twitter today.’” (Twitter hate aside, reviews published closer to the album’s release have been overwhelmingly positive, hailing Euro-Country as a triumph.)
CMAT is taking it all in stride, despite the urge to google herself to read “all the horrible things people are saying about me.” “Trying to find it funny and trying to find it bizarre is an approach that I’ve taken,” she says. “People willfully misinterpreting stuff that I say and then making it a headline… I just have to be like, ‘This is so stupid and so funny, and it’s nothing to do with me or my art.’”
Euro-Country marks CMAT’s third full-length album in just three and a half years. She credits much of her self-described “prolific” output to the fact that she wasn’t signed to a label until she was 25 years old. “It went from zero to 100 really quickly because I’ve been quietly sitting on a lot of songs. I had a lot to say,” she says. “The last job that I had before I became, literally, a famous popstar was fixing coffee machines in petrol stations over the phone… They’d break all the fucking time.”
