CMAT - Euro-Country

There comes a moment in all the best pop stars' careers where everything magically falls into place. The vision. The style. The hooks. The melodies. Madness and chaos intertwining with beautiful serendipity. Irish pop singer and all-around cultural icon CMAT has always proclaimed herself as the world’s greatest pop star, and now she has the album that fully encapsulates all of the qualities that make her one of pop's most brilliantly creative minds.

‘Euro-Country’ is fearless and audacious and resolutely CMAT from start to finish. No one else can really make music like this. No one else would be so bonkers as to even try. That’s the beauty of CMAT, though, and on this record, the scale of her ambition is met by the quality of her songs. She was already good, but this is a step up so vast it could scale mountains. The album’s affecting and wonderfully authentic traditional country is met by the aesthetics, the vaulting vision and the hooks of the greatest pop stars. It shouldn’t really work, but it hits every time.

She does it through being distinctly herself and embracing that slightly mad but utterly engaging personality, with incisive and tender wordplay on the lilting title track, or unhinged stream-of-consciousness quiet rage on ‘The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station’. A lot of ‘Euro-Country’ feels like a greatest hits album, so good are the singles that thread through the collection. Dig a little deeper, though, and you find more illuminating glimpses into the psyche of Ciara Mary-Alice Thomson - beyond the humour and the bawdiness and the bravado - like on the idiosyncratically tender ‘Lord, Let That Tesla Crash’. In the album’s ruminations on growing up and living in a small country with big dreams, you really get the sense of who CMAT is and the life she has always dreamt of living. A life that has been hard-worn and full of sacrifice, but has made her into the compelling songwriter she is today. Few other artists are operating on this level.

It’s taken a few years for CMAT to rise above niche legend status to a pop star genuinely befitting of her proclamations, but ‘Euro-Country’ is the perfect encapsulation of the career-defining album. Of course, she’s so good she’ll probably make many more that are better - but for now, ‘Euro-Country’ is a knockout, stone-cold five-star classic, and CMAT is very much the moment.