If you assembled a focus group of today’s country artists and asked them to list their biggest influences, a few names would probably rise to the top: Johnny Cash and Hank Williams; Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn. More contemporary icons like Shania Twain and George Strait would come up, and even underappreciated legends like Billie Joe Shaver and Tanya Tucker. But even if you sat this focus group down and locked them in a room for 24 hours, it’s likely not a single one of them would utter the name that singer Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson casually drops during our conversation in mid-June.
“Do you know Pussycat?” she asks.
If you haven’t heard of them before, you’d be forgiven. The Dutch country group never really made it stateside, but it topped charts across Europe with its 1975 hit “Mississippi,” a down-home love song about a place the band had never visited, complete with lead singer Toni Veldpaus’ “Southern” twang.
“They were desperately trying to make authentic-sounding country music, and they failed spectacularly at it,” she says, chuckling. But to Thompson — better known by her stage name, CMAT — that wasn’t a bad thing. To her, the band had created a seminal text — a beautifully campy piece of art, and a vital source of inspiration for her own approach to songwriting.
“I guess the difference between me and them is that I know I’m failing, but I lean in,” she says. “Maybe that means I’ll never truly be as great as Pussycat, but I’m happy to take my stab at it.”
To be clear, there’s no world in which Thompson would be considered a failure. The Irish singer first turned heads with her debut album, If My Wife New I’d Be Dead, in 2022, introducing the world to her singular brand of sharply written, off-kilter (and yes, undeniably campy) country-infused pop. “Always the cowboy, never the cow/I hate the way my life turned out,” she belts mournfully on lead single “I Wanna Be a Cowboy, Baby!”
In the Technicolor recesses of her mind, Thompson spins pop-culture brain rot, Irish history, and painfully honest observations about herself and the world around her into funny, wry hooks. She has the self-deprecating charm of Bridget Jones, coupled with the rich melodic tones and vocal acrobatics of Patsy Cline and Kate Bush.
When her sophomore album, Crazymad, for Me, topped the charts in Ireland, and rose to Number 25 in the U.K. in 2023, she earned critical acclaim and her first Mercury Prize and BRIT Award nominations last year. (And just in case you thought the success might’ve robbed her of a sense of humor, she made headlines for walking the BRITs carpet in a cheeky dress that elevated the art of the plumber’s crack.)
But it wasn’t until Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter tour stop in London that she knew she’d achieved a new level of notoriety: TikTok-trend famous. Over the past month, a dance set to her song “Take A Sexy Picture of Me” has gone viral, with the likes of Lola Young and Julia Fox joining in. Dubbed the “Woke Macarena,” the dance acts out the song’s tongue-in-cheek skewering of all the ways young women transform themselves in the hopes of getting male attention: “I did the butcher, I did the baker/I did the home and the family maker/I did schoolgirl fantasies … Now tell me what was in it for me?”
“I had a group of girls come up to me at the show and start doing the dance,” she says. “It was mad, and I just thought, OK, I think my life is different now.”
It was an unexpected milestone, but it’s one that she hopes will bring a larger audience to her upcoming third album, Euro-Country. Due Aug. 29, the album, Thompson says, is her “best work yet.”
The album name had been rattling around her brain for months, born out of years of experiences trying to find the right combination of words to describe her sound to other people, particularly the American media. Her songs often featured distinctly country elements like the banjo or the pedal steel guitar, but they could also veer over into straightforward pop or indie rock at any given moment. “People had no idea how to categorize my genre of music,” she says. “It happened in Ireland and the U.K. as well, but it was never worse than when I got to the States.”
Growing up in Dunboyne, Ireland, a small village outside of Dublin, Thompson’s education in country music began with Opry an Iúir, an Irish-language version of The Grand Ole Opry. From there, she took matters into her own hands, exploring the discographies of Cash, Parton, and Willie Nelson, but also more niche, influential acts like Skeeter Davis and the Louvin Brothers.
Thompson was drawn to outsiders, people who saw the genre, and the world, differently. From thousands of miles away, she connected to something deeper than stories of heartbreak and loss. She felt rooted in their sense of home — the bittersweet feeling of belonging to a place that you’re not always proud of, places that were neglected, repressed, or overlooked, but that would always be part of you.
“There’s something about living in the in-between that makes you think about your place in the world more deeply than people who have never had to come across that experience,” she says.
Euro-Country is an ode to that in-betweenness — the messy, difficult-to-box-in nature of Thompson’s feelings about fame, identity, and community. She opens the album singing in Irish Gaeilge, and for those first few lines, there’s no beat, no time signature, just Thompson’s lilting voice in the style of traditional Irish sean-nós singing before the drums kick in and the country-western influence takes over.
The words themselves are broken and imperfect — an intentional nod to the former fluency that faded as she got older and moved away from home. She sent the lyrics to her sister, a teacher, who reacted with shock. “It doesn’t make the most grammatical sense, and it’s quite abstract, so Noelle was like, ‘Oh, my God, they’re going to crucify you for this,’” she says. “I said, ‘Yeah, that’s kind of the point.’”
It’s heartrending and sincere — a love letter and a rebuke of herself and the nation that made her. Throughout the album, she holds up a mirror to each of them with a mix of rage, grief, embarrassment, and pride. “It’s almost like having a bad boyfriend,” she says of her relationship to Ireland. “You love him so deeply, but there are things about him that are very, very troubled. You can take it lying down, and pretend that nothing’s wrong, or you can try and deal with it. I’m someone who has to face it head-on.”
Chief among her concerns, and a focal point of the album, is the rising tide of fascism in Ireland and across the world. In recent years, as the country has grappled with a housing crisis and an influx of asylum seekers, far-right groups have mobilized, instigating “anti-immigration” protests and arson attacks on asylum shelters. “I find it’s, annoyingly, a particularly fertile topic for my songwriting,” she says. “Racist people in Ireland have never been more empowered in their lives. They’re coming out in droves, and there’s nowhere near enough people coming out and countering it, which is wildly upsetting.”
Thompson doesn’t make excuses for it; she traces it back to a wound she says is buried deep in the Irish psyche. “We’re this small country without much money or power, and deep down, we want to be America,” she says. “It trickles all the way down on an individual level, to someone like me who comes from a small village, who always had this thing in me telling me that being poor isn’t good enough, that I’ll never be good enough. I wanted to be American, and now I’m 29 years old making country-western music. I’m self-aware about it, but I can’t stop myself from doing it.”
She channels that anger into her latest single, “The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station,” a grungy, slacker rock track that would appear to be about the British celebrity chef. Already, she’s seen the song be misunderstood, though she’ll accept some of the blame for that after jokingly telling the crowd at London’s Wide Awake Festival that “it does read, possibly, as a diss track.”
“The song’s not about Jamie Oliver, he’s just this statue I’m hanging my lyrics onto,” she clarifies. Anyone willing to listen to the actual lyrics can see it’s not so much a diss track, but a reflection on the futility of dissing someone at all.”
“I’m wasting my time on seething,” she sings in one verse. “Ciara don’t be a bitch,” she scolds herself later.
“I can be quite a short-fused, intolerant, easily irritated person,” she admits. “But I’m trying to be a better person and trying to not let irrational hatred cloud my brain anymore. The song is me meditating on that hatred and how much it’s fucking ruined my life.”
That moment of self-reflection came after two major events last year: the loss of a friend and the near-death experience of another. All of a sudden, the very idea of success and pop stardom that she’d been chasing for years felt unbearably stupid. She had been working on new music before her friend’s passing, but after his death, even that felt inadequate.
“I was in that pop mindset of How can I make the biggest, shiniest thing possible? And then I just felt so stupid,” she says of the friend who died. “[He] was an amazing musician and a brilliant, fucking genius songwriter, and I just felt so embarrassed and ashamed of myself that I suddenly just had a motivation to make something that was weighty and had a point to it. It made me grow up, I think.”
On the day of the friend’s funeral, Thompson had just one day off from her European tour. She flew into Manchester, England, from Munich, and had to be off to Zurich the next morning. With less than 24 hours in the city, she decided to visit the apartment she and the friend had once shared. When she got there, she saw a Tesla parked on the curb outside. Even in her sadness, there are twinges of humor threaded into her upcoming song “Lord, Let That Tesla Crash.”
“I was just so angry,” she says. “I thought, I can’t believe that a massive cunt lives here now.” She reminisced on the hippie apartment covered in rugs and records, where they used to smoke weed and listen to music into the early hours of the morning. “I just couldn’t believe that the death of a person also brought the death of so many other things. There’s a place that doesn’t exist anymore because he passed away.”
It’s been four years since Thompson recorded her debut album, and in that time, she’s toured all over the world, played at Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage, opened for Sam Fender earlier this year, and reached the kind of milestones she’d only been able to dream of as a teenager holed up in her Dunboyne bedroom.
But long before she ever picked up a guitar, or put pen to paper, she was a songwriter, singing things off the top of her head just to express what was going on inside. It wasn’t about art; it was just instinct. On a subconscious level, music was a way for her to be understood — a tool to translate the emotions that were too thorny, too big to communicate in regular conversation. Now, it’s about more than that.
“I’m past the point where I’m making music to express myself,” she says. “Because I’m successful, because I’m in the position where people are listening, they’re coming to my shows, and buying my albums, I had to take stock and ask myself: Now that people are listening, what exactly do I want to say? That’s what Euro-Country is. I’m taking stock of what’s wrong to see if we can tear it to shreds and fix it. I know things can be better, so I write about the world in the hopes that somebody out there can connect.”
