CMAT: heartfelt, playful pop from the funniest person you know

“What was it that Orson Welles said? ‘There is something so arrogant about people who openly don’t like themselves?’” CMAT, an encyclopaedic cinephile and emotionally intelligent popstar from Dublin, knows all about not liking yourself – but she wants to clarify a couple of things. “I’m very aware of self-deprecation being used as a glorification of certain behaviour and I try to avoid it. But I also think it’s important to make myself as pathetic as I possibly can in my songwriting, because I am pathetic – and the point is to be like, ‘This is what I’ve done, this is how I feel, but you just have to move on and continue to believe you’re actually not a bad person.’”

She isn’t a bad person, but CMAT – real name Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson – writes songs with self-awareness so slicing it cuts through the warm treacle of her romantic voice with unnerving clarity. There’s a difference, she thinks, between self-deprecation and self-hate; between a pathetic optimist striving to do better and a selfish wrecking ball going round and round in circles.

A record obsessed with these contradictions could be dour, even dangerous in lesser hands, but Thompson’s wrapped it all up all with a pretty little bow and a wicked smile as she releases her debut album ‘If My Wife New I’d Be Dead’. That’s not a typo, rather a delicious wink to the kind of wrong and wry music CMAT wants to keep making. It’s catchy and extremely funny pop for those who need a bit of lightness, that still has meat on the bone for those restless, neurotic empaths hungry for more.

“People have miscategorized me a lot so far in my musical career,” CMAT says five minutes into a Zoom call with NME which twists and turns over almost two hours, spanning personal romantic turmoil to the reasons Greta Gerwig should marry Jason Momoa. “I think a lot of people think that I’m a humorist or comedy songwriter. I will never take offence, but I think a lot of people think this is all a bit for me. I take it very seriously – I hope with this album those people may finally understand I’m actually really, really good at writing songs.”

There it is again – the self-awareness and humour (“My ability to make people laugh is absolutely something my entire psyche rests upon,” she says), with just enough of an edge to keep you asking questions. And she has good reason to be so confident, as ‘If My Wife’ has a breathtaking emotional breadth and robust yet elegant melodies. CMAT claims she’s done “absolutely nothing to tailor my songs for the radio in any way, shape or form”, but her album is full of infectious, hopeful singalongs like soaring opener ‘Nashville’ and the poignant yet galvanising ‘Every Bottle (Is My Boyfriend)’, mission statements for lonely girls and gays falling in love and fucking everything up ad infinitum.

She says she wants the album to sound like “The Nolans making that record with Glen Campbell, which would go on to be covered by Paris Hilton”. The result is much less hectic than that makes it out, with the gentle banjo-led ‘Geography Teacher’ echoing very early Taylor Swift and the twinkling, pitched-up chords of ‘Groundhog Day’ sounding closer to the welcome return of The Chicks than today’s more mainstream yet moody cowgirls like Kacey Musgraves. She might not believe it, but it is perfectly tailored for the radio, to happily hum and sink deeper into with every repeat.

That unique sound, bottling the most charming textures of country music and candid lyrics propped up by mostly cheery, relatable lyrics comes from CMAT’s steadfast belief in how vital straightforward pop music can be. “I don’t think any type of music is more important than another, but I do feel like pop music, the most simplified and concentrated form of music, is the most useful and can get you out of a really tough spot,” she says. “Like, at Irish funerals at some point in the day there’s a disco and someone will stick on fucking ‘Sweet Caroline’. It makes no sense, but it’s helpful.”

CMAT’s music makes an unnerving amount of sense for anyone who’s ever worried about literally anything that anyone might think of them. There’s the laidback lament of ‘Lonely’ (where Thompson’s voice has the same spellbinding shimmer of Kate Bush and the sunny twang of her beloved Dolly Parton) and the aching melancholy of ‘I’d Want U’, the gorgeous album closer somehow written after a house party she went to at just 17. “One of my worst traits is that I haven’t really lost a lot of my teenage emotions,” she says of how close she still feels to that intense time in her life. “I’m 25 now, I think when I was 18 I had the emotional intelligence of a 12-year-old, so I probably have the emotional intelligence of an 18-year-old finally.”

Songwriting has always been second nature to CMAT, as she began making music aged 12 and only realised as she was reaching the end of her teenage years that not everyone processed their emotions like this. “I thought everybody was writing songs about their feelings all the time, because that makes the most sense to me.” But she had to keep following her own path, which involved a brief stint in a band called Bad Sea, followed by a move from Dublin to Manchester (during which she was the only person at a Charli XCX songwriting workshop to give the popstar constructive criticism about her music) and back to Dublin again.

She’s settled in Brighton now, and after a string of self-released singles – she was stubborn to steer clear from an album until everyone in her life “was like, ‘Just shut the fuck up and make the album, you need to have a body of work to justify the fact that you’re here’” – she’s ready to set the record straight on who she is, and what she has to say to the world.

It flits from flirtations with beloved indie filmmakers on the seductive ‘Peter Bogdanovich’ to a slap on the wrist for her own bad habits on ‘No More Virgos’, a shapeshifting beast that turns a propulsive banger into a long sigh of despair that she’s made the same mistake again. “I’d love to believe astrology means anything, but realistically it doesn’t and realistically the problem is me,” she says. “It’s not the Virgos fault for being a Virgo, it’s my fault for going after the same kind of person over and over and expecting a different result.”

CMAT knows who to blame, but also isn’t going to beat herself up about it. ‘If My Wife New I’d Be Dead’ is about finally making peace with what happened by, yes, singing about it, but also promising yourself that you can and will do better. Eventually. “The problem with me is that I am really romantic,” she says, catching herself before that becomes the whole story. “But my whole romantic notion is predicated on somebody coming and taking me away and fixing my life and all my problems. But then you get adulthood and two things are apparent. A) I have made a life for myself that I don’t want to be taken away from, I love my life and I’m proud of myself. And B) no relationship is going to fix any problem, you have to do that yourself.”

She goes on: “So I get into a romantic relationship and I’m like, what is this for? I’m just throwing shit at the wall and scrambling around for meaning. And that’s why I write songs, because I’m trying to figure out what I have a problem with. Maybe I’m actually not a really good songwriter – it’s just all my subconscious emotions doing the legwork.”

But let’s not kid ourselves, she wouldn’t want to upset Orson Welles by saying something so defeatist, disappointing those clinging onto her every pathetic word. “You have to find a way to like yourself otherwise you will ruin people’s lives,” she says. “Because there’s something so arrogant about hating yourself and then trying to make yourself be worthy of other people’s time.” CMAT knows how good she is, and is toiling away to turn that little affirmation into something that looks like love – for everyone’s sake.

CMAT’s debut album ‘If My Wife New I’d Be Dead’ is due out February 25

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