Under the glitz and gobbing off, an artful new LP charts CMAT’s elevation in the craft of Classic Songwriting. With salutes to Leonard Cohen and Judee Sill, she bears witness to everyday joys and sorrows – with a gag or three thrown in. “My sensibilities are towards the kitchen sink,” she tells VICTORIA SEGAL.

Up in flames: CMAT, AKA Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, fires on all cylinders.

Photography by DEBBIE HICKEY Debbie Hickey/Getty Images

COMING TO THE END OF THE JAMIE OLIVER PETROL STATION, A TRACK FROM HER imminent third album, Euro-Country, CMAT looks out into the audience at south London’s Wide Awake festival for a long, meaningful moment before wiping her face. “It’s snot,” she says, blaming allergies rather than emotional overload. “You have to call it what it is. But I’m only telling you because I want to prove I’m a real human girl.”

Nobody watching her tonight could doubt the song’s emotional force – or the impact it has on its writer. CMAT – the pop-star alias of Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson – has been storming around the stage in her flame-coloured shirt, hitting herself in the head and thrashing at an acoustic guitar as what seems like a satirical “diss track” about the celebrity chef (“God, I hate him”) escalates very quickly. First, there’s ferocious self-chastisement (“Ciara, don’t be a bitch/The man’s got kids/And they wouldn’t like this”), then hectic meta-commentary (“This is making no sense to the average listener”) before the song explodes into a surreal pileup of imagery that includes her mother, Sinéad O’Connor and teenage drug-taking. Thompson has walked lyrical tightropes before on the hyper-country-pop of 2022 debut If My Wife New I’d Be Dead and 2023’s Crazymad, For Me, jumping between “brain problems” and doomed romance, demons and better angels, pop culture and existential dread. Even so, Euro-Country feels like a huge leap forward, Norman Fucking Rockwell if Lana Del Rey was from Dublin, had better jokes, and danced like no one was watching.