{"id":100261,"date":"2025-08-29T06:23:02","date_gmt":"2025-08-29T06:23:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/100261\/"},"modified":"2025-08-29T06:23:02","modified_gmt":"2025-08-29T06:23:02","slug":"cmat-euro-country-album-review-pitchfork","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/100261\/","title":{"rendered":"CMAT: EURO-COUNTRY Album Review | Pitchfork"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mothball the cardigans, fluff the feathers, and zhuzh the tulle. lowercase is OVER. It\u2019s all names in lights now. Letters 10 feet high, blazing wattage, full razzle dazzle. The showgirl was back even before Earth\u2019s most famous fianc\u00e9e ordained it in her new album title: extroverted<\/a> triple<\/a> threats<\/a> hitting<\/a> every<\/a> single<\/a> base<\/a>, their turbo charisma shaking off the fetid blanket of the pandemic years and smashing through flattened platform hell. Add CMAT<\/a> 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<\/a> at last year\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

A while before \u201cgoing Nashville\u201d became pop\u2019s 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<\/a> obsession. She suddenly found her focus by writing the tearcatcher \u201cI Wanna Be a Cowboy, Baby!\u201d \u201cAnd I feel bad, \u2019cause I didn\u2019t cry\/When someone I grew up with died\/But I break down every time I\u2019m on the scales,\u201d she sang, minting her knack for self-aware tragedy, and, in its swaying chorus, for classic melodies. \u201cCowboy\u201d was the highlight of her 2022 debut, If My Wife New I\u2019d Be Dead. A year later, Crazymad, for Me upped the hit rate with the brilliantly blousy John Grant<\/a> collaboration \u201cWhere Are Your Kids Tonight?\u201d and jaunty fiddle kiss-off \u201cHave Fun!\u201d These songs showed an artist who had the voice of a barmaid Adele<\/a>, the rhinestone cool of latter-day Jenny Lewis<\/a>, and comedic chops all her own. \u201cHuh, silly bitch, woo!\u201d she trills in \u201cHave Fun!\u201d, realizing what a sucker she was for giving her ex all her cash.<\/p>\n

Her third album in four years, EURO-COUNTRY, is the first to fully realize CMAT\u2019s poly-threat potential. The songwriting packs a new punch and a ferocious sense of yearning. It mixes so many layers\u2014humor, devastation, irrational rage at seeing celebrity chef Jamie Oliver\u2019s face everywhere, politics, a distinct Irishness that has nothing to do with Claddagh rings and splitting the G\u2014and pretty much nails them all.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cmy Euro-Euro-Euro-country\u201d 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 \u201cCeltic Tiger\u201d period of rapid economic growth in the late \u201990s, when Ireland was transformed into a wealthy nation thanks in part to foreign investment and low corporate taxes. It didn\u2019t 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 \u201cghost\u201d housing estates and an epidemic of male suicides: \u201cI was 12 when the das started killing themselves all around me,\u201d she sings. The song bears so much weight and tells us exactly who she is: \u201cAnd no one says it out loud,\u201d she sings, \u201cbut I know it can be better if we hound it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mothball the cardigans, fluff the feathers, and zhuzh the tulle. lowercase is OVER. It\u2019s all names in lights…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":100262,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[375,6491,96,56,54,55,307],"class_list":["post-100261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-albums","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100261"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100261\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/100262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}