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<\/p>\nSeven months after the release of country-pop star CMAT\u2019s (Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson) third album, Euro-Country, her image appears everywhere across her home country of Ireland. Murals capture her high, flame-red hair and thrifted gowns. Her face appears on tourist shop merchandise and, as she puts it with typical precision, even on preset Redbubble cushion covers. Her writing, like her persona, thrives on noticing the oddly specific ways cultural saturation shows up.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a culture she\u2019s always longed to play a starring role in. As a child, she wished for fame every time she blew out her birthday candles. Sitting at the Chateau Marmont two days after her debut Coachella set, it seems that wish has finally come true.<\/p>\n
Thompson, thankfully, doesn\u2019t act like a famous person. She strolls in without makeup, fresh red hair dye staining her scalp, three glittering studs on her teeth that she flashes while talking as though she\u2019s not being recorded. She hocks back phlegm on a couple of occasions and violently rubs her tired eyes between questions. When she wants to be emphatic, usually when she\u2019s talking about niche British pop stars from the early 2000s, she points at me with a finger gun.<\/p>\n
It is an uncharacteristically quiet weekend at the Chateau. Last time she stayed here, she saw Diana Ross, Ashlee Simpson and the back of Kanye West (\u201cthe folds of his head are just so distinctive,\u201d she says). Today, the only people in the lobby are a group of women with a brindle dachshund who are comparing enneagrams. The setting is almost too perfect; a little on the nose for Thompson, who says \u201cAmerica is one of the main characters\u201d in her songs.<\/p>\n
Thompson has been studying American pop culture her whole life with a kind of Warholian obsession. \u201cI love pop stars, I love famous people, I\u2019m obsessed with them,\u201d she says. She has, and continues to collect, pop star dolls and paraphernalia. \u201cI bought the Selena Gomez Oreos. I\u2019m desperately trying to find the Madison Beer Cheetos,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Thompson\u2019s fascination with American pop culture developed in part from her youth in post\u2013Celtic Tiger Ireland, when leaders like Bertie Ahern were implementing economic policies shaped by American capitalism. It was a period that, as CMAT agrees, not only Americanized Irish identity but also taught a generation new, imported forms of aspiration and desire.<\/p>\n
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CMAT is making bold choices at the festival, playing different setlists each weekend and publicly supporting Palestine, refusing to compromise her values despite career pressures.<\/p>\n
(Sarah Doyle)<\/p>\n
She returns to this idea constantly in her lyrics, in which Ireland and America blur until the geography itself feels confused. She sings of \u201cthe New York skyline and West Cork,\u201d and \u201cFinglas, Tennessee\u201d on \u201cThe Jamie Oliver Petrol Station.\u201d She puts it most plainly on Euro-Country: \u201cTrying to be what he wasn\u2019t born\/ The pop star, U.S.A.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI think a lot of countries in the world are constantly trying to Americanize themselves and look to America because the thing that\u2019s great about it is how much money they have,\u201d she says, \u201cand all we want to be is pop stars and famous people.\u201d<\/p>\n
CMAT folded that same Ireland-America overlap into her Coachella set, pausing to teach the crowd the \u201cCounty Meath\u201d two-step, a dance she invented, named for the little-known part of Ireland she\u2019s from. The California crowd picked it up immediately. \u201cI know you know how to line dance\u201d she said, drawing a line between Irish tradition and American country music culture, the latter shaped in part by Celtic immigrant music.<\/p>\n
Growing up in Dunboyne, Ireland \u2014 a small village of about 5,000, with a nail salon, a hairdresser, two takeaways and two pubs \u2014 Thompson spent summers downloading Dolly Parton\u2019s back catalog onto her pink MP3 player, \u201cwhich was shaped like a tampon,\u201d she says. Parton is probably Thompson\u2019s closest musical and aesthetic comparison. Like Parton, her lyrics can be unusually bleak \u2014 there is one in particular on \u201cLord, Let That Tesla Crash\u201d that knocks the wind out of me: \u201cI\u2019d kill myself to find out if you think this song is good\u201d\u2014 while she presents herself through a kind of authentic artifice: a low-camp persona, gaudy dress and studied exaggeration. It\u2019s a style learned as much from Parton as from the spray-tan glam of her village and early nights in Irish gay clubs with a fake ID. (\u201cDublin gays are much different from California gays. They\u2019re poor\u201d).<\/p>\n
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\u201cThe gaudiness thing, I think it is gendered in a weird way,\u201d she says. It initially worked against her. \u201cAt the start of my career, my publicist pitched my song \u201cAnother Day (kfc)\u201d to the Guardian and somebody working there wrote back and said: \u201cSorry, we don\u2019t cover novelty acts.\u201d That same publication has since eaten its words, describing CMAT as \u201cthe sound of 2025.\u201d Last year, when she performed a career-defining set at Glastonbury Festival, in front of tens of thousands of people, it wrote that she would likely return as the headliner.<\/p>\n
She\u2019s already strategizing how to make that slot: \u201cI\u2019ll have to really put my nose to the grindstone and make three f\u2014 amazing albums.\u201d The ambition is clear, but so is the cost: She\u2019s spent a total of two and a half weeks at home in London this year, traveling so often she no longer gets jet lagged; \u201cgoing further and further down this dangerous rabbit hole, where if I kept going, I could turn around and realize I\u2019ve not spoken to my mum in six months,\u201d she says. \u201cThe trouble is, this is all really addictive.\u201d<\/p>\n
There is pressure, from all sides, to capitalize on her success. \u201cThe only reason I\u2019m staying at the Chateau Marmont is because my label said they need a non-album single by the end of the year, and because I\u2019m touring, I said I\u2019d only do it if they put me up here for a week.\u201d Instead, she\u2019s been going out for eggs and iced coffee. \u201cI\u2019ve not started the song yet.\u201d Nor does she know how to start one of the \u201cthree f\u2014 amazing albums\u201d she\u2019s supposed to make. \u201cI don\u2019t know how much more capable I am at this point, because I\u2019ve literally not lived a life for six years.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then there\u2019s still America to break. Asked about the first weekend at Coachella, one of her biggest opportunities in the States so far, she\u2019s ambivalent. \u201cThe band came off the set miserable because we couldn\u2019t really hear ourselves,\u201d she says, \u201cbut our worst shows are most people\u2019s best.\u201d She made a deliberate choice not to include some of her biggest songs, including \u201cTake a Sexy Picture of Me\u201d \u2014 a decision that, she says, \u201cmembers of the CMAT team wanted to shoot me in the f\u2014 head\u201d for. Instead, she\u2019s playing entirely different setlists each weekend. \u201cNo song will be repeated. People were telling me to do the best songs Weekend 1 because that\u2019s when all the press are there, but I was like, no way, I\u2019m going to do the more annoying songs for them.\u201d<\/p>\n
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