Pitchfork

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.”