FEATURE:
The Best Albums of 2025
CMAT – EURO-COUNTRY
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ONE of the best albums of this year…
PHOTO CREDIT: Suki Dhanda/The Guardian
is CMAT’s EURO-COUNTRY. As I have done with the albums in this series, I am going to get to some reviews with the artist, then I will end with a review of the album. The incredible Irish artist put out a work that gained huge critical acclaim. It is a funny, open and fascinating album that is distinctly the work from Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson. I am going to start out with an interview from The Guardian. They note how, from playing major gigs, to being this political and socially conscious artist, she was going supernova. EURO-COUNTRY is one of the most important albums of the year, I feel:
“She is incredibly forthright on a huge range of topics. She stands up for trans rights – “If you think of social media as like a video game, you rack up the spoils really high when you decide to go for a group of people who are already at risk” – and confronts the culture of wellness and self-improvement or, as she calls it, “the rise-and-grind ethic which is making people insane and making them unable to communicate with other people because they’re so obsessed with focusing on themselves”. Sometimes she’s too forthright for her mum, though: a recent appearance on Adam Buxton’s podcast provoked a dressing down. “She told me it made her cringe: ‘That lovely posh Englishman, so well spoken, and you calling yourself a cunt the whole interview. And you’re not a cunt, you’re lovely.’”
And yet, she concedes there has been a significant downside to her breakthrough. “The kind of headspace that good songs come from is one of extreme emotion, extreme depth of feeling,” she says, “which has an impact on my life. I do live in that really heightened state of emotion all the time. I’m crazy and I do crazy things, and I have crazy relationships with people.” She doesn’t mean crazy as in wild or outrageous, she qualifies. She means crazy as in authentically unwell, or – as she puts it with characteristic bluntness – “mental”.
Now 29, Thompson thinks she has always suffered from auditory hallucinations, but during the making of her third album, “I started actually hallucinating. I was in New York, writing. I didn’t realise for the first two months that was what was happening, but I basically imagined the entire apartment I was staying in was crawling with insects, that I had insects crawling on my skin all the time. I was calling the landlord, letting off bug bombs, I made them throw the couch out because I thought it was covered in fleas. I was itching all the time. I was texting a group chat of friends, sending them pictures of all the bug bites on me: New York’s disgusting, full of insects. And they didn’t exist. I went to the doctor and showed him my bites and he said: ‘Those are stress hives; you’re mental.’” (Possibly not an exact diagnosis.) “I was hallucinating the whole time.”
For that reason, she worries that songwriting might not be a sustainable occupation for that reason, or that taking medication might cause the flow of songs to stop. But whatever the pains staked in writing its contents, her new album is superb. It pushes at the boundaries of her previous work’s sound: into synth-heavy territory on the title track, pop soul on Running/Planning and distorted alt-rock on The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station, a song during which the constant sight of the TV chef’s face in Britain’s motorway services seems to bring about an existential collapse in the mid-tour CMAT.
It arrives in a sleeve featuring its title, Euro-Country, written in the kind of Gaelic script beloved of Irish theme pubs, above an exceptionally striking photo based on Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 1896 painting Truth Coming Out of Her Well. It features Thompson emerging from a fountain in the middle of a shopping centre near her home town of Dunboyne. “Blanchardstown shopping centre,” she says. “For the first 10, 11 years of my life, it was like my local village. My sister, who lives in Blanch now, goes to the shopping centre every day. You drive there if you want to see other people and then you drive back home again and live in your house by yourself.”
That’s the reality of much of Irish life, she says. “There’s a kind of space that Ireland is occupying in western media culture right now, a little more fetishised and trendy than it’s ever been. Americans think it’s cute; English people are like, ‘Ooh, I love Guinness and Kneecap and The Banshees of Inisherin, and I’m getting my Irish passport and mmm, I love potato farl.’ People talking about Hozier like he’s a magical, delicate fairy from the bog. It’s a romanticised version of Ireland that doesn’t exist. It’s a really hard place to live, a really hard place to grow up, unless you have money, which we didn’t. So yeah, magical, beautiful, mystical Ireland: it’s a shopping centre, that’s what I grew up with. A shopping centre.”
Thompson says she is aware that the political bent of Euro-Country is a big ask of audiences in 2025, when pop seems to largely function as a means of temporary escape from a terrifying world. “It can be read as incredibly cringe and incredibly earnest and on the nose, right? It’s an embarrassing thing for me to be asking of people. Because it’s not trendy to be earnest any more. I’m aware of that, and …” She laughs again. “Actually I don’t care. I don’t care if I’m putting my foot in it, I don’t care if I’m saying something wrong. We’ve all been too measured, too careful because we’re being witnessed all the time. I think we need more willingness to fail. Even if it’s futile, you’ve got to fucking try. Because it’s fucking depressing otherwise”.
I am going to move to DAZED and their chat with CMAT. Having moved from Dublin to London, there were questions around the city and CMAT’s relationship with it. They also asked about the politics on EURO-COUNTRY, her fascination with Charli xcx, and her sudden rise to fame:
“How has your relationship to Dublin changed now that you’re older?
CMAT: I just like looking back and seeing it from the outside, even though I’m still connected to it. I love Joan Didion and I love her writing on California because she talks about the texture of living there, not some romanticised idea. I try to reflect that mentality in my songwriting about Ireland and Dublin. There’s a version of Ireland people think about from afar, and then there’s what it actually feels like on the ground.
Do you think people from other places can relate to that feeling?
CMAT: I think that’s true of every country. Everybody has their own relationship to this, and a lot of countries are going through similar things. Some politicians I mention in my album, like Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, are getting voted back in again in Ireland, the same ones that messed things up 25 years ago. A lot of countries are falling to fascism. I was talking to someone from the Philippines recently, where the son of former dictator Marcos is now in power. A lot of countries are repeating mistakes; it’s madness, but I suppose it’s because people love convenience.
People in the world really hate me for speaking out, I get horrible messages all the time
Alongside tackling political issues in EURO–COUNTRY, you also spoke out about Palestine on stage – what was that moment like?
CMAT: That was… mad. I knew I was going to say something – obviously, I had to. I’d been given the biggest opportunity of my life, and if I didn’t do or say anything, I’d be kicking myself. But I was so scared of that gig in general. I actually wrote a speech, and then, like, an hour beforehand, I was like, ‘I can’t make this speech, I’m going to fuck it up so badly because my nerves are unbelievably bad.’
So I thought, you know what? I’ll just get through the show and say it at the end. I probably would have done something more elaborate if I could, but it’s scary being on stage. It’s not as bad as it is for the Kneecap boys, but it’s terrifying. You’re in front of 60,000 people, and you want to give a speech about something real. People in the world really hate me for speaking out, I get horrible messages all the time. When I played Latitude last year, I had pulled out initially because of Barclays sponsoring, then came back when they dropped them, and in the front row were two guys with massive flags, there specifically to antagonise me. There were 25,000 other people there, and these two were trying to intimidate me.
I think more credit needs to be given to people like Kneecap and Amyl and the Sniffers or anyone who speaks out, because it’s genuinely scary. These people exist, they want to harm you, and you’re just standing there going, ‘Let me run away.’ It’s such a fucking weird time.
What do you want people to take away from the album?
CMAT: If someone listens to the album and doesn’t like it, that’s literally fine, I don’t care, and that’s literally grand. But I hope anyone who’s gone through any of the things I mention in the songs can identify with them and that it helps, in any way, shape or form. That’s the job. That’s the most useful thing. Like, when you write a sad song and someone says, ‘I listened to that the day someone died,’ yeah – that’s the job. So I hope that happens”.
I am going to bring in a final interview before coming to a review. VOGUE published an interview in August. CMAT is clearly ready to take over America. I am not sure if that is a goal of hers. However, EURO-COUNTRY has translated beyond Europe and a small section of people. It is a global success. With it, CMAT is being hailed as one of the greatest songwriters of this age – and rightly so! Make sure you hear this masterpiece of 2025:
“Thanks to the distinctly American country-pop influence in her music, she’s come to understand certain cultural discrepancies between the US and the UK. “Class works very differently in America,” she says. “In the United Kingdom, all of the bands, musicians, British celebrities, actors—they went to private school. If you click on their Wikipedia, their dad owns Northern Ireland, and you’re like, what?” she says. “That’s who my colleagues are. I’m very fucking aware of how precarious my position is as a result of that. I’m just trying to work four or five times harder than them to make sure that I can stay here for as long as possible.”
American culture was inescapable when she was growing up: “Johnny Cash was the most famous guy,” she says. “I thought he was a pop star. I thought he was like Robbie Williams or something.” Much of the fascination, she says, came from America’s capitalistic hustle culture. “The way everybody [in America] is always trying to gain something and make something of themselves,” she says, “you’re not allowed to talk about that kind of stuff in Ireland, and yet we’re so fascinated by it.”
Despite the impression that her campy, wisecracking lyrics may give, CMAT’s love of country music is pure of heart. “Isn’t it interesting that I have a terrible time in Nashville?” she wonders aloud. She loves the people and the culture, “but the country music establishment in Nashville hates my fucking guts.” CMAT has found that people treat her like an “intruder”: “People think that I’m taking the piss or I’m using elements of country music because I think it’s a funny, interesting thing to do, and not because it is a really inherent and important pillar of my work as a songwriter,” she says.
It’s CMAT’s working-class Irish roots, however, that stoked and sustain her love for country in the first place. “This is a genre that inherently allows voiceless people to come to the front,” she says. “That’s why it’s amazing and that’s why we’ll always have an appeal, and it’s why people will always want to listen to it”.
NME provided a five-star review for EURIO-COUNTRY when they sat down with it. Hailing CMAT’s third studio album. NME note how modernity has failed us, yet CMAT has laid it all out on this extraordinary and “full-bodied” work:
“It’s been a CMAT summer, for sure. She’s charmed the pants of many a festival – sealing the deal with real Glastonbury moment – ‘Running/Planning’ was ironically inescapable for radio play, and she struck TikTok gold with the celeb-endorsed viral dance challenge for ‘Take A Sexy Picture Of Me’. There’s an infectious joy to all that Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson does, but she wouldn’t be here (on the brink of proper superstardom) if it wasn’t for the emotional suckerpunch she lands with each LOLsome lyric, every pintful of charisma, every bedroom mirror dance moment.
While her strong 2022 debut ‘If My Wife New I’d Be Dead’ and buzz-building follow-up ‘Crazymad, For Me’ saw her hailed as “Dublin’s answer to Dolly Parton” by translating her troubled romances and chaotic personal life into rootin’ tootin’ bangers, the political pressures of the world elevate her third album to a more profound level. Camp, conviction and catharsis burst from ‘Euro-Country’.
Birdsong and a gentle Irish voice lead us into ‘Euro-Country’, but where are we? It’s as much a place as it is a concept and a state of mind. As she puts it herself, it’s a term she coined for her continental take on the genre, a nod to how Ireland still sits proudly in the EU under the euro, and how “capitalism is one of the worst things to ever happen to us”. “I was 12 when the da’s started killing themselves all around me,” she sings on the opening title track, remembering the impact of the financial crash on families when she was growing up, “And it was normal… Building houses that stay empty even now.”
There are straight lines to be drawn between this and For Those I Love’s recent opus ‘Carving The Stone’ in the depiction of the havoc wreaked on Ireland by greed, but this is less brutal, with different shades of light. Adele-sized in its scope and in showcasing Thompson’s lung capacity, ‘When A Good Man Cries’ takes a fiddle to the heartstrings as she cuts to the heart of her evolution as a writer (“All of my jokes have turned to prayers because they’re scarred just like their mother”), while the the pop highs bring on altitude delirium.
The mini-epic almost proggy pure jam of ‘The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station’ is a hilarious therapy session on her misplaced not-really-hatred for the celebrity chef in lost hours at motorway services, while ‘Take A Sexy Picture Of Me’ just totally pumps while reflecting on the pressures of social media and ultimate ear-worm ‘Running/Planning’ lampoons the relationship expectations put upon women.
From the bubbling, genre-smashing ‘Tree Six Foive’ to the existential ‘Ready’, the hilarious open road anthem ‘Coronation St.’, the brilliantly bitter ‘Lord Let That Tesla Crash’, and pleading showstopper ‘Janis Joplining’, the personal meets the political over a cosy bed of dreamy pop.
Modernity has failed us, but that won’t stop Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson. That’s the CMAT way in 2025: approach with absolute confidence, total honesty is the only option, and you might as well have a laugh and shake your bits while you’re at it. ‘Euro-Country’ has the courage and the consistency to land high on the fast-approaching end-of-year lists, and to make CMAT the icon she’s been giving all this time”.
I am going to wrap up. Not only one of the critics’ favourite album of the year, EURO-COUNTRY is one of mine. I wanted to spend time with it and the artist behind it. You wonder what is in store for CMAT next year. Massive stages and maybe more singles. Perhaps collaborations with artists like Charli xcx and some surprises here and there. Who knows. What we do know is that her fanbase will continue to grow. With EURO-COUNTRY, CMAT has released one of the best albums…
OF this decade.