Breakout Irish star CMAT has given the lowdown on one of the industry stories of 2025 in our huge Music Week cover story.
The singer-songwriter, real name Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, releases her highly-anticipated new album Euro-Country on August 29 via AWAL.
“This is a good album,” she told our August edition. “Life happened to me and bad things happened to me, but my creative wheels were really, really greased and my muscles were there; that’s why it’s so good. I don’t think I ever would have been able to make an album this good if I had been forced to wait to release it.”
The 29-year-old’s viral UK hit Take A Sexy Picture Of Me became her first single chart success last month and has become a TikTok hit with its own dance trend – the ‘Woke Macarena’ – coined by influencer Sam Morris in May. Adopters have included Julia Fox and Amelia Dimoldenberg.
For Thompson, the dance’s virality shows that the song’s message about the contortions women and girls put themselves through in order to be deemed attractive by society is hitting home.
“Firstly, it’s so incongruous,” she said. “I don’t have TikTok on my phone because people were so mean to me. There were so many nasty comments about my physical appearance. That kind of stuff was the genesis of the song.”
It’s been so valuable to know I’m not out here on my own, that I did a really good job of describing something that is difficult to describe and make someone understand
CMAT
Thompson has been heartened by the level to which the track has resonated. Take A Sexy Picture Of Me has topped 10 million streams on Spotify, where CMAT has amassed 2.7 million monthly listeners.
“It’s been so valuable to know I’m not out here on my own, that I did a really good job of describing something that is difficult to describe and make someone understand,” she said. “When you’re a woman aged 18 to 25 people are really, really nice to you all the time everywhere, if you’re, you know, somewhat attractive or pretty. Then, you get to your late 20s, and suddenly all those people have just disappeared, people holding doors open for you and that kind of thing.
“I thought, ‘I will continue to keep rapidly becoming less and less important and of less commercial value to society as I was when I was a 20-year-old girl,’ which is really fucked up and gross.”
On Euro-Country, Thompson also faces up to the death of a friend and the fallout from Ireland’s Celtic Tiger economic boom of the mid-1990s to mid-2000s.
“I feel like I grew up a bit, to be frank, I went from being about 12 to being 29 overnight,” she said. “There’s just a lot going on in the world right now and it’s hard to stay apathetic. I am someone who is a pop artist and loves pop and big, stupid, escapist dance routines. But there was an element that was really falling flat, I wanted to re-centre things so it was less about my personality and more about my songwriting. It felt like a natural progression.”
I had a complete lack of education and was never in a scene. I’ve always been very isolated
CMAT
Hailing from Dunboyne, County Meath in Ireland, CMAT’s first two albums – Ivors-nominated Crazymad, For Me (22,093 UK sales, OCC) and 2022 debut If My Wife New I’d Be Dead (13,967 sales) – both topped the Irish charts. Reflecting on her unorthodox ascent in the business, she said: “I think my version of events is quite interesting, and I feel more and more like my origin story is interesting. I meet more people in music and I realise how fucking unique it is.
“Pretty much almost everyone I know in London went to BRIT School. Off the top of my head, with the exception of a handful, people either went to BRIT School, or they got signed when they were 15. Those are the two types of musicians that are in my songwriter-y, performer-y position. And neither of those things happened to me.
“What’s unique is that I made contact with people through the internet, I had a complete lack of education and was never in a scene. I’ve always been very isolated.”
The full CMAT cover story is published in the latest issue of Music Week – subscribers can read it here.
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