CMAT ‘Euro-Country’ review: A (super)star is born

A TikTok dance being assigned to your song can prove a fast-track to success in 2025. Few of them, though, are for songs as profound and impactful as ‘Take a Sexy Picture of Me’. The stunning recent single from CMAT is a recounting of how the Irish singer — Ciara Mary Alice Thompson — was body-shamed online using photos taken across last summer’s festival season.

“I’ve been having a horrible time,” she sings on the song’s absurdly catchy chorus, highlighting the nonsensical and unreachable standards set by the world. “Make me look 16,” she hopes of the picture, “Or like ten, or like five / Or like two, like a baby.”

Writing a song as savvy, vital and also catchy as this — so much so that it can catch fire online with accompanying dance moves — is the genius of CMAT, one that is showcased better than ever on her third album, Euro-Country.

Sitting somewhere between a pop star and a country singer, Thompson’s music is driven by humour but never sugar-coats the sincere and necessary messages at the core of her songs. Like Self Esteem before her, she’s managing to Trojan-horse underheard topics and perspectives onto the radio waves.

This approach is also shown on ‘The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station’, a song she insists is “not a diss track” to the TV chef, but instead an exploration of her own capacity for hatred. “Ciara, don’t be a bitch,” she tells herself in the last chorus. “The man’s got kids and they wouldn’t like this.”

This delicate balance of humour and profundity is achieved perfectly throughout Euro-Country, an album that deserves to make CMAT a household name, a path she appears to be already on.

A lot of the album — and its title — concerns the struggles of a modern Ireland, the urge to move away like many millennial Irish musicians have begun to do, and a continued connection to the heritage of the country. The album opens on ‘Billy Byrne from Ballybrack, the Leader of the Pigeon Convoy’ with her singing Irish, while she has commented: “My relationship with Ireland is that of a bad, toxic boyfriend… there’s a lack of honesty surrounding our collective view of the country right now.”

Issues on both personal and political levels, frivolous and life-dependent, are tackled with equal importance on Euro-Country, a catchy, important, hi-larious album from a singer who is deservedly set to be the breakout star of 2025.