TL;DR
- CMAT is a rising bisexual pop star.
- Her album Euro-Country won Best Album at the Ivors.
- She addresses LGBTQ issues and body image in her music.
- CMAT’s stage presence captivates audiences.
- She emphasizes originality in her songwriting.
When I ask CMAT whether it feels surreal to go from being an awkward teenager to being a bisexual icon, she doesn’t miss a beat. “Well, they’re kind of the same thing,” she jokes. The comparison isn’t perfect, she admits with a laugh, but “gay people do have arrested development by nature of generally making up for lost time.” At age 30, it’s safe to say the Irish singer-songwriter, whose third album Euro-Country just won best album at the prestigious Ivor Novello Awards, has been racking up milestones at a breakneck pace.
Last month, she made her Coachella debut, hot on the heels of her February appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. She just wrapped up a string of headline shows across the United States while the music video for her single “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” rocketed to nearly three million views on YouTube. There may be a mural of her face back in her hometown of Dunboyne, but her fame on this side of the pond is finally reaching an inflection point — though she might be in denial about that. “Am I really famous in Ireland? Yes, I am. I’m not that famous in America,” she maintains during an interview in her green room at Brooklyn Steel, over two cold diet sodas from the mini-fridge.
It would be easier to believe that if I didn’t watch her completely enrapture a worshipful, two-stepping crowd later that night. Her first hit, “I Wanna Be a Cowboy, Baby!” — famously written at age 22 right after she dumped her boyfriend and then-bandmate to strike out on her own — is the anchor point of any CMAT show, a mournful, five-minute plea that becomes an almost hypnotic group line-dance. That kind of command over a crowd is something CMAT once dreamed of having while growing up in and around Dublin. She literally wished for pop stardom while blowing out her birthday candles. “I always just wanted to be famous,” she says of those early childhood aspirations. “I don’t know where that comes from. I wish I could figure it out. I could probably do therapy at some point in my life and figure it out, but I don’t want to.”
Whether she understands the impulse or not, it’s working. More listeners are falling in love with her intricately crafted country pop, exuberant style, and high-energy stage presence, leading to some of her highest-profile bookings yet: She will play Lollapalooza in Chicago this July, and New York’s iteration of the All Things Go festival in September, among other major dates overseas. But even as all signs point to more recognition ahead, she’s not so sure. “I don’t think it’s going to happen,” she says. “I think we’re pretty much plateauing as big as it can get.” But if her star does keep rising? Then we’ll be drinking “freezing diet colas,” she says with a sparkling smile that reveals her tooth gem. “Freezing.”
Euro-Country is CMAT’s third full-length album and her breakthrough record. But the furor around CMAT is about more than just her music; it’s about how directly she uses her platform at a moment when many in the industry shy away from politics altogether. Just last week, when she won Best Album at the Ivors in London, she used her acceptance speech to deliver the kind of straightforward but impassioned rhetoric that her fandom so admires. The remarks came after Nigel Farage led the U.K’s right-wing Reform Party to major electoral victories across England, running on an anti-immigrant and anti-transgender platform. “Fuck Reform, fuck Nigel Farage,” CMAT said. “I have no time, sympathy, or empathy for anybody that decides to make life more difficult for people who are just trying to live.”
That same candor is all across the record that carried her to the Ivors stage. On “Take a Sexy Picture of Me,” which became a viral sensation, CMAT addresses the predatory, appearance-based pressures placed on girls from a young age. (“Ever since I was a little girl,” she sings in the devastatingly funny opening line, “I only wanted to be sexy.”) Another standout, “The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station,” self-consciously explores the sort of inexplicable rage someone might feel toward a random celebrity, with CMAT scolding herself: “Okay, don’t be a bitch / The man’s got kids, and they wouldn’t like this.” (Oliver himself took it on the chin, based on his subsequent appearance in the music video.) Her lyrics, alternately clever and cutting, even within the same line, are a point of pride. “The work is all mine because it’s all written by me and it’s all co-produced by me,” she tells me. It’s a kind of originality she believes is currently under threat from artificial intelligence. “Half of the people who were nominated for Best New Artist at the Grammys this fucking year have used generative AI in their albums,” she says, “and everybody in the music industry knows it, and nobody wants to talk about it because then you’re seen as a little ratbag who’s ratting them out.”
There is no mistaking Euro-Country for AI slop. The album feels wholly conceived from the start, like a sculpture carved out of a single block of marble. But it didn’t come easily. “I’ll probably talk about it in a book in five to 10 years time or something, but the making of Euro-Country was so much harder than I’ve ever been able to communicate,” she tells me. “I’m not going to say label, but people in my team really didn’t fucking get it, and really didn’t fucking get the way that I made it.” The record found her returning to collaborator Oli Deakin, who co-produced her 2022 album If My Wife Knew I’d Be Dead, after making a “second album with someone else in a proper studio in a proper way, in a professional kind of way.” She doesn’t mean that as a slight, she clarifies, but she needed Deakin to help her fend off people who she says were trying to tamp down her freakiness during a protracted “four-month argument” over Euro-Country. Her position? “It’s got to be weirder, and it’s got to be more nuanced, and it’s got to be more specific.” It’s a struggle familiar to any creative who has been pushed toward the mainstream. This despite the fact that audiences, almost paradoxically, often find more universality in the specific than they do in the generic.
CMAT’s favorite example? “The greatest song of all time, that somehow touches everyone and everyone can relate to in their life, is [Leonard Cohen’s] “Chelsea Hotel,” where he’s talking about one blowjob that happened on one afternoon in New York on one evening, and then the girl died later, right?” she says. “That shouldn’t be so unbelievably relatable and shouldn’t be so unbelievably universal and tragic.” And yet it is, because it taps into a “weird type of separated grief,” even for people who “never met Janis Joplin.” But whether she’s sticking to her creative instincts or sticking up for trans people, it’s CMAT’s seemingly relentless self-belief that has propelled her to this point.
Asked about all the leaps of faith she has taken in her career, from that breakup at age 22 to going with her gut for Euro-Country, she muses, “I’ve been able to do those things time and time again. And every single time I do one of them, I’m like, ‘You just know it’s going to be a pain in the arse for a really long time, and if it does reap dividends, you’re not going to get them for a year or two.’” After this latest bet on herself, at least, those returns are clearly coming in. CMAT used to see more daylight between her stage persona — a brightly dressed, hyper-confident country diva — and who she was in her daily life. She used to call that projection of herself a “a pop star who writes songs about a girl called Ciara” — a reference to her government name, Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson. “That was a line that I had for a while, and then that became less and less true because the two were becoming one,” she says. “I think they might be the same person now. Because I think my stage presence used to be aspirational, but now I just am the thing. Now I just am the pop star, and there’s people actually buying tickets to the show.” Every pair of cowboy boots in the very gay Brooklyn crowd is proof she has been right to march to her own beat. “I don’t feel like any of this was an accident,” she says.