Meet Ireland's newest popstar CMAT: 'I’m not trying to be a normal girl — I never was one'

With a Brit Awards nomination to her name and a Choice Music Prize-sweeping breakthrough, is Claire Mary-Alice Thompson Ireland's next pop superstar?

Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, CMAT. Picture: Nina Val

• Irish popstar CMAT caused a stir on the Brit Awards' red carpet on Saturday with a cheeky dress that showed a hint of her derrière. In October, Kate Demolder chatted to the popstar as she released her second album. 

Much has been said of late about the dissolution of true, great, era-defining music. Given the nature of streaming, and of the TikTok-ification of youth culture in particular, the music business has never seemed more gameable. 

Yet, the ability to create a viral smash has also, perversely, led to an oversaturated landscape in which everything feels especially fleeting. In this sense, pop stars, or stars of any kind, are few and far between — or perhaps more presciently, everywhere and all of us.

One rare exception is that of 27-year-old Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson or CMAT, the bonafide pandemic-era success with her debut album If My Wife New I’d Be Dead, which shot to number one and won the Choice Music Prize for Irish album of the year in 2022. 

CMAT attending the Brit Awards 2024 at the O2 Arena, London. Picture: Ian West/PA Wire

Two of the singles released from the record, ‘I Wanna Be A Cowboy, Baby!’ and ‘I Don’t Really Care For You,’ present a sort of honky-tonk glamour that is both sweeping and finger-snapping, the former staking claim on deeply embedded social anxiety and detachment from one’s emotions, the latter a post-breakup rumination rendered with unusual clarity.

CMAT made a name for herself, in Ireland and further afield, by creating that very sure thing, one that satisfies the core requirement of great pop music — and pop music’s youthful fans — which is to make the mundane feel cinematic. And so CMAT’s new record, Crazymad, For Me, is loaded not only with the customary second-album expectations but with ideas about the health of an entire industry. Not that she thinks the same. 

“My first album, it did quite well, but it wasn’t this life-changing cultural thing… I’m not The Strokes.”

Thompson grew up in Dunboyne, a town of about 7,000, some 15km northwest of Dublin. In school, she was weird. “There’s this kind of relatability thing happening right now in music, which is like… I get it. It’s very nice when you can relate to someone, but I’ve never really been relatable. I used to wear costume jewellery from the 1940s or whatever the fuck when I was in secondary school. And I’d have fake eyelashes and a Bump It [a hair accessory used to create a quiff] so I’d look like Amy Winehouse. I’m not trying to be a normal girl, not that I know what that is anyway, because I never was one myself.”

It’s almost definitional that youthful, genre-defining music should celebrate its freedoms and intricacies rather than scolding it. Plenty of modern music is depressing, but the flaws they recount — identity crises, heartbreak, poverty — tend to be personal, not systemic.

Thompson, by comparison, is downright Swiftian (Jonathan, not Taylor) in her understanding, takedowns and pointed mockery of millennial and Gen Z culture.

CMAT: "I’m not trying to be a normal girl, not that I know what that is anyway, because I never was one myself.” Picture: Nina Val

In ‘Rent’, a nearly five-minute ballad about a failing relationship bolstered only by necessity and rising house prices (“Your bed and cartoons could have been my life”) builds to a crescendo with the clarity of a choir singer, the depth of a canyon and the supple indignation of a soul who’s lived many lives. 

In ‘I… Hate Who I Am When I’m Horny’, Thompson dissects the nature of situation-ships, based on her own experiences with cheating. “You get to a stage in a relationship, or at least I have, where you stop finding someone attractive, and realise you’d have sex with literally anyone else on Earth but them,” she says. “And it’s a really difficult thing to talk about because of the shame and Catholic trauma so many of us deal with. 

"I just felt like I’d never heard anyone come up against this feeling in music before so I wanted to, even though it’s mortifying.”

Then comes ‘Can’t Make Up My Mind’, where suddenly, the harmonies grow more intricate and less predictable, and the lyrics sharpen. “Like a teenage Frankenstein, my head’s a mess but from the neck down I’m fine… I’m actually fine.” 

The chorus makes use of a Sondheimian wordplay that mightn’t appear revolutionary on paper, but when sung, evokes huge amounts of power. “I’ve the constitution of lemon and lime, I’m fizzy and I can’t make up my mind.” The melody spins in tight circles before eventually ending where it began, leaving any listener to miss parts of themselves they’ve never even met.

Crazymad, For Me is CMAT's second album. Picture: Nina Val

Again and again, on Crazymad, For Me, Thompson either holds her punches or punches up, something that is especially notable in her duet with John Grant (“he invented vibes”), ‘Where Are Your Kids Tonight’; “Didn’t all your choices make you lovely?/Bad ones only make you disappear.” 

The song that strays farthest, however, from self-entitlement is ‘Vincent Kompany’, a tale of self-consciousness by way of personal failings, body image and misogyny. “I actually had loads of fun writing that song, which is not like a usual experience for me,” Thompson muses.

“It was my friend Declan McKenna [English singer-songwriter] who helped me finish it. I had told him about this time where I cut all my hair off, and, because of that, we wanted to mention a bald celebrity to use as a simile. So it was originally called Stanley Tucci. But that didn’t really sing well, like it didn’t have enough consonants or something. 

"Then Declan found Vincent Kompany, this former Manchester City player, and it just worked. It also felt kind of full circle because the song was about a time when I was in Manchester, and Kompany is like a local legend. He also seems like a really nice man, who does loads for the community and loves his kids. So it felt kind of perfect to name it after him.”

If If My Wife New I’d Be Dead was a single-minded project designed to publicly connect with peers by way of heartache-laced storytelling, Crazymad, For Me (named for a lyric from the Sheena Easton song ‘9 to 5,’) is a brazen record to nurse systemic loneliness — an album on which Thompson begins to turn the mirror away from her relationships and towards herself. 

She is at her best when pointing inward (“Because I message you all the time/If you’re bored you might reply,” chimes ‘Whatever’s Inconvenient’ ).

“I wanted to structure the record in such a way it’s split into three parts,” she smiles. “The first is all of the songs where I’m like ‘poor me, poor me. He was a bastard, he was a dickhead.’ Like, the early stages of breakup. And then the middle section is me being like, I’ve actually done lots of bad things as well. 

"Because I liked the concept of lulling people into a false sense of security, and then using that against them. Then it ends with the feeling of ‘it doesn’t matter’, which is the last three songs.”

"I moved to the UK and discovered I was plus-size." Picture: Nina Val

I bring up how rarely women are afforded the opportunity to show the bad sides of themselves; the lazier, ruder, sloppier elements we keep indoors. “I feel like I’ve mentioned Lena Dunham in every interview I’ve had today, but I just feel like she’s done the thing that I’m now trying to do musically — which is to make myself look as pathetic and bad as possible because I think women aren’t afforded that opportunity. 

"But then, she did it, became successful for it, and was hated for it. And it’s like… I don’t think Lena Dunham is any worse a person than Dua Lipa. I just think that some people are really careful about what they put out there for fear of being hated.”

Might she have been perceived differently if she were a slimmer, more feminine-presenting woman, I suggest. “Mmmhmmmm,” Thompson nods. “It’s funny because I’ve only started talking about body image recently because I was in a really good place with all that kind of stuff back when I made the first record. 

"Then I moved to the UK and discovered I was plus-size. And men just don’t get this same commentary. 

"Like, think of all the times you’ve heard a woman or girl say that they’re going on the keto diet or the Special K diet or whatever… for their health. That said, there is an egg and wine diet that was published in Vogue before that I think I might do just because it’s hilarious.”

Thompson, like any of the great artists before her, has mastered the narrative art of dressing down her past loves while rendering herself equal parts victim and victor. Perhaps it’s because she’s had the time. Almost all her work has been several years in progress — a number of the tracks on Crazymad, For Me, have existed, in “some sort of form”, for close to five years — meaning she has had the time to reflect, react, and reconsider her worth again and again. 

She, too, has taken serious cues from musical icons such as Sandie Shaw and Easton, about cleverly infusing her music with cryptic titbits designed to poke and prod the feelings we thought we’d hidden away. In every way, she too feels like a star, carving and mining inward to create meaning in a world that often rallies against it. She, too, commits to a can’t-look-away Dynasty aesthetic that sits with her beautifully. (Every time she smiles, jewel-toned tooth gems shine brightly.)

As for her art, it doesn’t come without torture. “I was really stressed out the entire fucking time [I was recording],” she laughs. “Because I really tried to execute it well in the very little time I had. But I actually think that helped it. So, yeah I’m happy with this record. I think I did a really good job.”

• Crazymad, For Me is out now