CMAT has never been shy about scale. At the start of the year, she was in Sydney at the Factory Theatre, belting out a blistering cover of the Divinyls’ “I Touch Myself,” a wink of reverence for Chrissy Amphlett delivered with a grin and a gut punch. Since then, her year has expanded into something near-mythic: Glastonbury sets, swelling crowds, and now her third full-length, Euro-Country. It feels like the tipping point, the moment where Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson’s blend of wit, melodrama, and pop-country precision pushes her to the edge of superstardom.
What makes Euro-Country so compelling is CMAT’s instinct for pairing melodic effervescence with subject matter that veers from tragic to absurd. On the title track, she recalls the Irish financial crash with unflinching directness—“I was twelve when the Das started killing themselves all around me”—before pivoting only a few songs later into “The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station,” a stomping honky-tonk banger about despising a celebrity chef, complete with the chorus: “It’s like, okay, don’t be a bitch / The man’s got kids, and they wouldn’t like this.” These swings are not contradictions but the point: humour is survival, and pop is the medium sharp enough to hold both ends of the spectrum.
There’s plenty of country homage here—slide guitars on the deliciously petty diss track “Tree Six Foive,” barn-burning rhythm sections that give her storytelling heft—but the arrangements are never beholden to Nashville orthodoxy. Instead, CMAT stretches the palette into what feels like a genre of her own. “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” laces bright hooks with biting observations about toxic femininity (“Nine years old, tryna wax my legs with tape”), while “Coronation Street” finds her laying bare the paralysis of early adulthood: “I’m twenty-three and everyone is having fun except for me.”
The emotional range sharpens further in the album’s quieter moments. “Lord Let That Tesla Crash” is devastating in its matter-of-fact humour, mourning a friend with lines like, “You said, ‘Ciara, be nice, and you wear too much foundation.’” “Running/Planning” is pure pop confection—layered melodies, spiraling harmonies—that builds into one of the year’s most irresistible earworms.
Even the artwork insists on multiple frames of meaning: a pastiche of Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Truth Coming Out of Her Well, once a symbol of the Dreyfus Affair, here recast as commentary on modern misjustice. The canvas CMAT works with is wide—financial collapse, pop culture, personal shame, national politics—and she paints it with a laugh that often lands right before the sob.
Euro-Country is a triumph because it resists the flattening impulse of pop stardom. CMAT insists on her contradictions: high camp and despair, country tropes and post-internet irony, satire and sincerity. In that way, she recalls Chrissy Amphlett—an artist unafraid to weaponize humour, sexuality, and vulnerability all at once. Amphlett’s snarl hid a deep ache; CMAT’s grin disguises a sharp scalpel. Both understood that to truly confront the world’s absurdities, you need to be funny, fearless, and just a little bit feral.
Stream Euro-Country HERE.
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