Top 50 Albums of 2025: No. 2 – CMAT: Euro-Country | music

TMaking CMAT’s third album was a risky business. While holed up in New York, writing and recording the sequel to 2023’s Crazymad, For Me — which, despite critical acclaim and a Mercury nomination, the singer herself declared unsatisfactory — Ciara Marie Alice Thompson suffered what sounds like a very terrifying breakdown. “I actually started hallucinating,” she said earlier this year. “I didn’t realize for the first couple of months that this was what was happening, but I basically imagined that the whole apartment I was staying in was infested with bugs… I went to the doctor and showed him my bites, and he said: ‘These are stress hives, you’re a psychopath.'”

One assumes that was not the case exactly What he said, but you get the gist. However, although its author compared its recording to a “toxic relationship”, Euro-Country does not seem like it was a difficult thing to do. On the contrary: it sounds like a very assured work for a songwriter whose abilities have reached a new peak. It is, by turns, poignant, poignant, deeply angry, deeply funny and full of stunning tunes. She confidently moves away from the country style she forged on her 2022 debut If My Wife Was New I’d Die, into territory that touches on jazz (Janis Joplining), raucous alternative rock (Jamie Oliver’s Petrol Station) and soulful pop (Running/Planning; Take a Sexy Picture of Me) without losing the essence of what made her successful in the first place.

Listen to her break the fourth wall during Jamie Oliver’s gas station, with a cry of “This doesn’t make sense to the average listener”; Pause her description of the crumbling relationship when the good man cries to berate herself for being “a mess of people, Diana Dunboyne”; Or deliver the opening as wait-What? Like Lord’s song, Let That Tesla Crash (“I heard that death comes in threes / I got it wrong, being from Dublin / I thought ‘death is in the trees’ / Which makes sense ’cause they’re the saddest plants”). Time and time again, you’re struck with the feeling that this couldn’t be anyone else’s work.

Before its release, Thompson expressed concern that the album’s socio-political orientation would be read as “incredibly awkward and incredibly serious”, but she need not have worried. Euro-Country has tackled serious topics with a light, intelligent touch, and in blending her lyrics with melodies that undeniably intertwine body shaming, mental health, Irish identity, and the injustices of late-stage capitalism (“all the messing around around the shops,” she says, “and the lack of identity”) without making the listener feel like they’re being lectured.

It manages to investigate the human cost of the 2008 financial crisis in Ireland – on a main track that includes references to legendary Irish warrior Cu Chulainn and Kerry Katona. In the same line — and sparking a viral TikTok dance craze, popularized by Chicken Shop Date’s Amelia Demoldenberg and actress Julia Fox, among others: by all accounts, a major accomplishment. It also informed a stunning Glastonbury performance that sounded like an infectious explosion of faintly chaotic joy.

Thompson described Euro-Country as “the most important album I’ve made”, and as an ending to something: “breaking up with the old version of myself”. Understandably, she didn’t “want to make another record where I flog myself for three months in a weird New York apartment and there’s imaginary bugs crawling everywhere.” In that interview, she wondered out loud whether songwriting was a sustainable career for her; Whether seeking treatment for her mental health might cause the songs to stop flowing. Whatever the future holds for CMAT, Euro-Country is a landmark in her career, and in pop music in 2025. It’s the triumphant work of an artist who seems to be out there on her own, completely inimitable: proof of the power of crafting your unique identity in a climate where pieces of cake often reign supreme.