As CMAT’s EURO-COUNTRY receives rave reviews across the board, here are some of the standout lines and lyrics from the Dunboyne Diana’s third album EURO-COUNTRY
The third album in three years from Ireland’s global pop star makes good on that initially cheeky promise of her nascent career.
CMAT is now genuinely one of the finest songwriters and live performers operating in a global context, with EURO-COUNTRY reflecting Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson’s own brand of cheeky, hearty countrified pop singalong anthems, writing with supreme confidence about her lack of self-confidence, self-examining with a poignancy, self-awareness, melancholia and laser-pointed pop culture references.
CMAT has been a great lyricist and songwriter since the beginning, with an ability to encapsulate a home truth in a funny grinned line or relate her own experience through a larger scale.
That skill has only got more potent on EURO-COUNTRY which spends some of its time ruminating on the identity of Ireland through its post Celtic Tiger emigration-heavy lens, the cover of which sends up Jean-Léon Gérôme’s painting Truth Coming Out of Her Well with that in mind..
As she said in the lead up to the album, as well the EURO-COUNTRY title meaning Ireland, and the genre of music she makes, EURO-COUNTRY is also:
EURO-COUNTRY is the type of loss, pain and lack of community that i feel we are suffering from under modern capital isolation. It feels like a very different flavour to everything i’ve read about happening in other historical times and i wanted to try and capture it, while i’m here.
So with that in mind, let’s talk lyrics:
EURO-COUNTRY
“All the big boys, all the Berties
All the envelopes, yeah, they hurt me
I was 12 when the das started killing themselves all around me
And it was normal, building houses
That stay empty even now, yeah
And no one says it out loud but I know it can be better if we hound it.”
On Substack, announcing the album CMAT called Ireland “the most toxic boyfriend i’ve ever had, the place which has changed so much that i feel sad every day i can’t return the version of it that is in my head.”
Nowhere is that more palpable on EURO-COUNTRY than the title track, which has quickly inserted itself on the mantle as the best song inspired by the people most affected by the Celtic Tiger crash – those that lost all they were encouraged to invest and put stock into – only to be left with broken promises, unemployment and desperation.
The ravaged recession is articulated on the song with the Irish identity’s attempt to be subsumed by any other culture but our own – with mythical Irish figure Cú Chulainn mentioned in the same breath as Atomic Kitten’s Kerry Katona, the contrast also laid bare “all this pop star USA” and “mooching around shops” – underscored by the music video shot in an ultrabrite soulless American mall-style Omni Shopping Centre.
And the poster boy for all of this – Bertie Ahern – the country’s former Taoiseach, the Mahon tribunal white whale, eventually taken down by accusations of corruption, financial mismanagement and the unaccountable bankers his party emboldened with their cloud cuckoo land “we all partied” encouragement.
That Ahern was being touted as a potential presidential candidate is a reminder that Ireland has a short memory and buries its shame and pain all too easily, and CMAT’s timely reminder of what happened to the ordinary folk when the country crashed is a necessary and vital reckoning with our recent past, and what the Tiger goons actually did.
People, mostly men, killed themselves as a result – and CMAT’s song articulates that plainly with a necessary acknowledgement.
When A Good Man Cries
“I waited for love with a cricket bat
I got what I want and I kicked it flat”
The opening line from the the country pop of ‘When A Good Man Cries’ is classic CMAT, a bludgeoning beginning to a doomed romance.
The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station
“Things are ugly to me, I get it
A flip phone with a lack of credit
And others beautiful, I remember
Blanch right at the end of December”
A delightfully unhinged inner monologue on CMAT’s instinct to irrationally get annoyed by others, the song has some standout phrases and lines with mention of “social Calpol” (Buckfast presumably), “Sinéad in Ratoath and Sinéad in the sky” (namechecking her mother and Sinéad O’Connor) but it’s the evocative “Blanch right at the end of December,” that speaks to having a festive time in Dublin at Christmas, shopping centre and all.
Take A Sexy Picture Of Me
“I did the butcher, I did the baker
I did the home and the family maker
I did school girl fantasies
Oh, I did leg things and hand stuff
And single woman banter
Now tell me, what was in it for me?”
The verse that CMAT made go viral with a dance made for Tik Tok is also just really smart writing, and speaks to societal and sexual expectations on women.
CMAT also said:
“Single woman banter” is maybe one of the most important ones. There’s this, like, texture in conversations that I come across with women in their 20s and 30s where you just hear them going in on themselves and in on themselves in a way that they think is, like, funny banter. That’s actually really harmful, and it’s really not good because there should be no reason that existing as a single entity should be a bad thing.
@bbcradio1 she did the butcher, she did the baker and she PLAYED THE PYRAMID STAGE AT GLASTONBURY 🫶 Listen on @BBC Sounds | Watch on bbc iplayer #Glastonbury #BBCGlasto #cmat #takeasexypictureofme ♬ original sound – BBC Radio 1
Bonus lyrics from the song where Ciara speaks directly to her fans and gets her demographic and how they listen to her music “I’m here if you need me, deep in your afters”.
“No doctor or Pope can grant diagnosis
I’ve peeled through the forums
And there’s no cure for old sis
But here’s a message to the party girls
Dragged out by their ankles
I’m here if you need me, deep in your afters”
Ready
“I did everything that Gwyneth asked of me
I took all of that self love on board
Now I’m just bored
Oh what’s the use of grounding with no one there around ya”
Maybe vagina candles, how to yawn guides, suggesting women have insidious yeast infections, sticking jade eggs up ya and pumping oxegen in your colon isn’t the answer.
Yeah, GOOP and toxic wellness isn’t the answer.
Iceberg
I really think Rose could’ve made room on that floating door
You just agree, I swear that you wouldn’t have before
You used to wanna pick fights and scream about any ol’ thing
Now you’re drowning just like Jack did
This is a song about my best friend Bella. It’s funny, we’ve been best friends since we were 14, and I’m a pop star and she’s a lawyer. She’s the most studious, hardworking person in the world. When she got her job which she’d worked towards her whole entire life, I saw the pressures of this ambition and this full-time work completely beat her down for a while. And she started to go in on herself. I found it really funny that she thought that I wouldn’t know she was suffering. This is the thing in female friendships that I think is so beautiful—you cannot pull the wool over my eyes. I know who you are. There’s a joking line in the beginning of it where I’m like, ‘Where did you go, crazy girl boss?’
– CMAT tells Apple Music
Coronation St
“I spent all my money on things that keep me tired
And give me bingo wings
That cannot fly but keep me up all night”
Chef’s kiss writing.
I also love the desperation of “I’m just a barmaid with no lines
That lives on Coronation Street.”
Lord, Let that Tesla Crash
“When I turned 22, I had no real friends to speak of
Who would watch me like you, if I’m honest I don’t have one now
Dressed up, for the pub, felt so silly and quite underloved
Until, you were you, and pulled out all seven inches of that song by Culture Club, I’d been yapping on about that month
I spun, you spun, in some attempt to make me happy and I was, I was, I was, I was”
‘Lord, Let that Tesla Crash’ is a song about a friend who died, the regrets left behind with the Tesla a reference to the car that occupies a space outside the former flat they both shared.
This vignette of a verse is a moving tribute to that friendship, and how two people bonded over singles from a synth-pop band from the ’80s, with a confessional line about the songwriter’s friendships now paling by comparison.
Niall Byrne is the founder of the most-influential Irish music site Nialler9, where he has been writing about music since 2005. He is the co-host of the Nialler9 Podcast and has written for the Irish Times, Irish Independent, Sunday Times, Totally Dublin, Cara Magazine, Red Bull and more. Niall is a DJ, co-founder of Lumo Club, event curator, Indie Sleaze club promoter, and producer of gigs and monthly listening parties & events in Dublin.
