Quick question for you, Dear Reader. If you were a certified international pop star arriving for a photoshoot for the cover of a magazine, what’s one book you’d bring with you? For Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, better known as CMAT, the answer is obvious: a photobook of celebrities in their pants. “It cost me about £50, but I HAD to have it.” She says with a laugh as we flick through from Paul McCartney (pants on the outside of his trousers: poor effort) to Jools Holland (nothing but pants and a tie, smoking a cigar: A+).

Not that CMAT’s only here to give us a new perspective on Britain’s favourite Hootenanny host. She’s also gearing up for the release of ‘EURO-COUNTRY’, her third album. Things have skyrocketed since we last spoke to Ciara, with a rightly lauded Glastonbury set, huge performances on Graham Norton and Jools Holland (with the host in a full set of clothing, you’ll be happy to hear), and a dress at the BRIT Awards which showed just enough arse to cause headlines around the world. It makes sense, then, that ‘EURO-COUNTRY’ is her most ambitious and wide-ranging work yet. Any country music aficionado will still be able to pick out the influences and instrumental nods to the genre that anchor the album, but it also has a magpie sensibility which grabs from any other genre that fits into the end result.

Lyrically, it’s also broader than anything CMAT has done before, moving beyond the personal and into bigger and more universal themes. Far from being abstract, though, these issues are all filtered through Ciara’s own experiences. “’EURO-COUNTRY’ is a bird’s eye view over what late-stage capitalism has done to us all emotionally,” she explains. “That’s what I was mainly thinking about and dealing with. The title-track is me going into my own past and upbringing to be like: this is the culture I was reared in. It was all about commerce, it was all about making gains, it was all about profit, profit, profit. It was Ireland, and it was the Celtic Tiger, and then the economic crash happened, and all of the politicians just blamed people for buying four houses when that’s exactly what they were told they should do. I really wanted to dig into what that has done to us as people, what capitalism does to people.”

It’s big stuff and could easily feel hackneyed if done wrong, but the raw thread of personal experience which runs through everything on ‘EURO-COUNTRY’ ensures it never drifts off into abstract thoughts or grandiose notions with no relatability. For anyone at all familiar with CMAT’s discography, it’s no surprise that she manages this tightrope walk with seeming ease. Right from debut single ‘Another Day (kfc)’ back in 2020, which focussed on a post-breakup breakdown in a chicken shop, she’s proven herself a master at sincerely tackling heavy issues without rendering them maudlin or just plain bleak.

This time around, this ability is flexed to its absolute limit. “The album goes between a lot of things within the overall theme,” she says. “On ‘Iceberg’, I’m talking about the fact that my friend has a job that makes her fucking miserable sometimes, and at one point made her completely dormant and mute, which really worried me – and that’s just because she had a job! ‘When a Good Man Cries’ is about what numbness and peeling your edges off, and not experiencing life, does in interpersonal relationships. ‘Jamie Oliver Petrol Station’ is about a confusion at reality and just me thinking, ‘What is going on? I don’t understand the world; why am I seeing Jamie Oliver’s face all over a petrol station?’

“Every song touches on an emotional detail of what it’s like to have come up in this era of capitalism and what it’s done to us all as people. It’s made us all a lot colder, a lot more emotionless and isolated, which I just wanted to grapple with. Ireland’s such a good example of why that hyper-fixation on capital is such a bad thing. I’m very confused as to how [England’s] image of Ireland came about. You’re all here splitting the G and wearing [Irish brand] Pellador. You’re really into Kneecap now – you bitches are the reason that the Irish language almost died! Not that I’m even angry at it; I just think it’s hilarious. The image English people have of Dublin is that it’s some little village where everyone speaks Gailge and plays the bodhrán. It’s this antiquated version of Ireland that existed in the minds of New Yorkers in the 1960s.

“I don’t know why it’s happened – possibly because America sets the tone for what’s happening in Western media and culture, and they have a fascination with Ireland right now because it’s the most exotic place that they can think of which is still predominately white. Or maybe it’s because English people are now educated enough to be ashamed of British history and are trying to extrapolate themselves from that by clambering onto Irish culture. Either way, the reality of Ireland is that most of it is quite like Milton Keynes. It’s just shopping centres and cement and roads and no services and no community clubs and nothing that really exists outside of sport, really. It’s a very depressing place to grow up if you don’t have any money.”

This demystification of a place that is endlessly misunderstood by people from outside the country is most evident on the title-track, summed up by the brutality of the line: “I was 12 when the das started killing themselves all around me”, made all the sharper by the gentle country-flecked instrumentals which it nestles alongside. It’s a bleak snapshot of a period directly after the 2007 financial collapse that has been erased from most official accounts of recent Irish history.

“I wondered if I was hallucinating how many people in my village committed suicide around that time,” says CMAT. “And then I read a book called The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donaghue and there’s a line in that about it which made me realise this wasn’t just my experience, it was everybody’s. It happened all across the country in a really concentrated burst of one or two years following the collapse of the market, and we never spoke about it again except for people like me, who were children when it happened. That’s something very specific to Ireland and I don’t know that it was really replicated anywhere else.

“The thing Ireland really suffers from, particularly ambitious Irish people, is that they want to be England, or they want to be America. We’re always electing government officials who want to be ‘a power in Europe’. But what’s wrong with not being a power in Europe and instead just being chill vibes and looking after the poor people that exist in your country? There’s been years and years of basically no social services or community programmes, and everyone’s just been by themselves on Facebook, scrolling and getting radicalised by the far right, then coming out and shouting, ‘Keep Ireland for the Irish’. It’s depressing to see, and the Irish tricolour is starting to have a very, very negative tint to it for me as a result of that.”

Throughout her career thus far, CMAT hasn’t been one to shy away from discussing social and political issues, so it perhaps makes sense that these topics have found a way into her music this time around. But in a world where artists are feeling more and more compelled to speak out against injustices on stage, it’s a surprise that this sense of anger and activism over the state of the world doesn’t make its way into more of the actual music. Especially galvanising recently has been the plight of the people of Palestine, something that both CMAT and many other artists have been vocal about, but which she doesn’t think is a topic which will find its way into many albums, now or in the future.

“All of this stuff is worth talking about,” she says. “And music is a really good medium to do that, but no one can really go there because of the way the music industry is structured. I couldn’t necessarily put my whole political pussy into this album because I still wanted it to sound good, and I still wanted people to hear it. John Lennon, right, he was allowed to sing terrible ham-fisted songs about what was happening politically at the time because all he was doing was making a record and selling it to the consumer. That isn’t how it works any more. For my music to be heard, I have to please radio, television, brands, streaming services - so many islands of commerce. If I were to turn around and make an incredibly on-the-nose political record next week, maybe a thousand people would hear it because they’d have to buy a physical copy of it. Streaming services wouldn’t platform it, or Instagram, or radio. It’s fucked up, but you can’t make politically contentious music anymore, and I think a shift is coming where the public just isn’t going to tolerate this representative apathy anymore. They want a call to community. ‘Give peace a chance’ – it’s embarrassing and it’s cringe, but it’s right!

“Along with that,” she continues. “I think that political songwriting is not very trendy or cool or interesting to a lot of people because it can be cringe. Not that cringe is bad! But I also feel that songwriting that isn’t personal is not worth anything to me. My heroes were Leonard Cohen and Judee Sill, and their art was them. The art is me, and I can’t really do it any other way around. I would love to write an album about the Titanic, but unless I drowned in a boat disaster, I couldn’t do it. In the same way, it would obviously be a really good idea for me to write a song about something that’s happening in the world right now if I wanted to cash in on that in some way, but songwriting is only ever worth its salt if it’s coming from a genuine place, right?”

Nothing on ‘EURO-COUNTRY’ comes from a more genuine place than ‘Lord, Let That Tesla Crash’, a painfully heartfelt track towards the end of the album which deals directly with the loss of an old friend who was one of the first to believe in Ciara as a songwriter. “This is such a wanky thing that I’m about to say,” she warns. “But love should radicalise you. And I feel like the reason I needed to put that song on the album is because someone that I love died, and he was so important to me in so many ways. I was obsessed with him when I was 21 years old, and I learned how to make country music because he loved country music, and I just wanted to impress him. He would put me on for a lot of gigs around Manchester. We used to do open mics together. He found a place for me to live in his house that he lived in, I lived in the same house as him for almost two years, and he was an amazing, amazing person and an amazing, amazing friend. Really, the album started being made when I found out he died, which is a mixed feeling for me. It’s terrible that art is something which unavoidably commodifies something so awful happening, but I think he’d understand, because he was also a songwriter.

“I think I’ve been struggling to take myself seriously for quite a while and I never really made something which was intentionally important or serious until I made this record. But I did it because it’s something he’d have wanted me to do and because he always really believed in me, and then he died. I never got to give him the credit that he deserved, and I just felt like making this record could make me feel a bit better about that, and it kinda has. [‘Lord Let That Tesla Crash’] needed to be on there, because there’s no point talking about politics or social issues if there’s not emotional core there. He’s the emotional core of the entire record for me.”

There’s a lot feeding into ‘EURO-COUNTRY’, but the real joy of the album is how effortless CMAT makes it all feel, with these emotional touchpoints and social issues all present but all fitting seamlessly into songs which are also very good fun. That funnelling of competing influences and lack of laser focus wasn’t an easy one to wrestle into an 11-song album, which is also, you know, actually enjoyable to listen to. “I did go insane making it,” she says with a laugh. “I was hallucinating insects crawling on my skin in the studio! I think basically me and my producer worked all day, then I went home and scrubbed my floor to get rid of the imaginary insects while my producer was still in the studio drinking a bottle of wine through a straw. It was a bit intense, to be honest with you, but that was mainly because I didn’t have a reference point. The second album was, of course, ‘Bat Out of Hell’ for the girls, but I really had no reference point for this one. It was free falling; there was nothing to grab onto.”

“I actually wrote a song yesterday,” she continues. “And it was a song I’ve been working on for years and years, but I thought I’d finally cracked it and then realised that what I’d actually done was accidentally written the song ‘Night Changes’ by One Direction. It’s so hard to be a woman artist, because while I love to engage in critical thinking and intellectual speak, I did ultimately just listen to a lot of boy bands for quite a long time.”

Obsessing over boy bands may be detrimental when it comes to accidentally plagiarising very famous songs but when it comes to staging a live show, it’s definitely served CMAT in good stead. Even her early gigs in small venues were theatrical, choreographed, and very good fun. That’s only ramped up as time has gone by, with her most recent headline tour having higher production values than some arena artists, all crammed onto a stage which most definitely is not big enough to accommodate the props, dancers, and full band show. Luckily, the world is now catching up with her, and the gigs are finally getting as big as CMAT deserves. There’s a sold-out Brixton show, three dates at Barrowlands in Glasgow (two of which are sold out at time of writing), and just the small matter of her Glastonbury performance this year, set to be on the Pyramid Stage. Yes, the same one that all the headliners play – you know, the stage which is the single biggest deal in the whole of the UK.

When we raise this, Ciara’s first reaction is to mime throwing up out of anxiety – so far, so good. “It makes me want to puke,” she says with a laugh. “But we’re going to do the most locked-in, clean, rehearsed show of our lives, and it’s going to be great. The Glastonbury audience are so ready to have the best time of their entire lives, so you have to match that and you have to deliver. That obviously creates the most amount of nerves I’ve ever experienced anywhere in my life! I do think that what people get wrong is that they think, ‘Oh it’s special, so I have to do something special’, and they bring out Dave Grohl or do a string section or something, and then it all goes wrong. My Glastonbury show will be the show we’re doing at every festival, but it will be as locked in as it can possibly be.

“I think our last Glastonbury performance made my career, so it’s obviously an important one. But the live show is important to me anyway, because I like people. I like meeting them, I like watching them, I like listening to them. The place where you get to meet the most people is at live shows, and the best way of earning their trust and acceptance is to put on a really good show and to enjoy it as much as the audience is.