The Irish singer-songwriter became a pop sensation in 2025, releasing one of the year’s greatest albums. We met up with her in New York City to talk about EURO-COUNTRY, putting care into presentation and authenticity into performance, and why she’ll never perform “Lord, Let That Tesla Crash” live.
I, like the great singer-songwriter Judee Sill before me, have always been and always will be a cunt. It’s something I’ve always known about myself, and I frame this early realization as follows: at a certain point in one’s upbringing, they begin to realize that they take after one of their parents more than they do the other. Perhaps your father emerges into adulthood opinionated, stubborn, gregarious in social settings, intense, quick to judge, quick to vocalize when he felt he’d been wronged. Perhaps you have inherited all of these traits, but carry on your mother’s hair and stature and, well, gender. Maybe report cards will bear the phrase “independently minded” and your childhood friends’ parents will sweetly rhapsodize about “the beat of your own drum,” but we all know the word we’re grasping for here. If my brother had inherited this specific type of intensity, it would just be his way. But me? I’m a cunt.
With a sweaty palm pressed against my mother’s, for 18 years I would bound up the path to our weekly Sunday mass and drop to my scraped-up knees to creaky wooden pews, begging an all-seeing God for forgiveness for being like this. At eight years old, I sobbed through my first holy confession in those pews, telling a priest deeply unimpressed by my theatrics about whatever innocuous school antics I felt sorry for, but in my head, I pleaded for some kind of total absolution that would force me to behave forever so I’d never have to come back. If he was truly all-seeing, he surely knew the word for girls like me. He knew I was one of them.
Though I elected not to return to church of my own volition the second my mom gave me the choice, I found myself drawn to art which repurposed the ritual and sound of those incense-steeped halls where I’d been baptized and confirmed, like the pageantry of guilt had carved its cross deep within me and refused to relent. One of these artists I found a kindred spirit in was little-known songwriter and ex-reform school church organist Judee Sill, who had been a prisoner, a thief, an addict, and—by all accounts—a cunt by the time of her death in 1979. Through country-baroque, gospel-inspired love songs doubling as devotional hymns, Sill begged for salvation that a traditional institution of worship would not grant her. The first time I heard “The Donor,” an 8-minute chorale paraphrasing the “Our Father” from her 1973 record Heart Food, I knew it would be one of those songs I’d hold dear for as long as I could take in breath on this wretched planet—full of sin and suffering and maybe more girls like me than I’d originally been led to believe.
Meanwhile, in the Irish village of Dunboyne, Meath, 16-year-old Ciara Marie Alice Thomas fell into a twin romance with “The Donor” after learning about Judee Sill from a music teacher at school, and still regularly refers to the track as her favorite song of all time. “It’s kind of the same song over and over again for the two albums,” Thomas—the artist now known simply by her initials, CMAT—told podcaster Adam Buxton about her love of Sill’s brief but miraculous discography earlier this year, “which is her begging God for mercy and forgiveness for being such a terrible cunt.” Buxton laughs, and you can hear the grin in her voice when she adds, “which is basically all of my music, as well. All the time.”
Before I knew about our mirrored love for Sill’s Bach-inspired cry heavenward, I had one of the earliest CMAT singles, 2021’s “I Don’t Really Care For You,” served to me on a playlist, though I can’t for the life of me recall who made said playlist. And in this song, too, I heard a shameful plea to a higher power to forgive so long as we know not what we do. Yet, instead of the ceremonial strife carried by a swirl of voices that ache simply in their harmony, CMAT’s concerns came in the form of a twangy, line-dance-ready backbeat and a lyrical specificity—cutting and wickedly funny—that spun a snapshot of two soon-to-be-ex-lovers hashing our their final goodbyes into a Motown-worthy rave-up. It will stay with me always, the exact moment I first laughed out loud upon hearing a CMAT line, both with delighted surprise and pained familiarity, during the song’s second verse: “I just spent sevеn hours looking at old pics of me / Tryna pinpoint where the bitch began / Somewhere after the Passion of Christ / And before I had an Instagram.” I now realize that this could be a reference to the 2004 Mel Gibson film The Passion of Christ, but in that first flash of epiphany, I felt it had ancient implications—gesturing toward a savior who had perished for the sins of women like us and expected his penance in song ever after. I considered myself an immediate convert to the CMAT cause, and in time, became a vocal evangelist.
“My favorite genre of artist is a woman who made one or two things in her life and then was crushed by the world of sexism,” CMAT tells me during what, at least on my end, feels like a long-destined meeting at the end of a 5-year road—during which, as a Paste intern, I stood as the sole editorial voice pushing to include her debut record in our weekly New Music Friday round-up and persisted until it made the cut. She tells me about her penchant for this “genre” in the upper lobby of her Lower East Side hotel, trying to roll the sleeve of her ruched black shirt up to show me the back of her arm. “Can you see it? You can’t see it,” she grumbles, turning to give me a better view of a sizable tattoo of none other than Judee Sill.
Upon mention of our shared love of “The Donor,” she seems to crack open a musical encyclopedia stored solely in her memory, reeling through a list of other women artists active during the ‘70s—Vashti Bunyan, Karen Dalton, and Dory Previn among them—who fit the mold for this favorite genre of hers in one form or another, whispering fairy stories until they were real and then promptly being chased out of potential folk stardom in the peak Laurel Canyon days. CMAT points out where Judee lives and breathes and begs in the tracklist of EURO-COUNTRY, her third album, noting how many questions she’d received since the record’s September release around the soaring final bridge of the song “When a Good Man Cries”, breaking from the track’s prior honky tonk swing and into a last devotional cry: “Oh, I can feel what I hated in dreams / Help me not hate myself, help me love other people / Oh, I’ll wear the beads, I’ll read, ‘Kyrie Eleison.’”
That closing Greek-Orthodox expression, translating to “Lord, have mercy,” had been key to the text of our shared favorite song—now passed between writers’ hands as a prayer for cunts across decades. I think Ms. Sill would be proud to know that the phrase has landed in the stead of “the people’s mess, Dunboyne Diana,” as CMAT refers to herself in the same song, who now hears it cried back from the mouths of deeply devoted crowds wherever she plays.
IT ONLY TAKES A cursory listen to those first two records—2022’s If My Wife New, I’d Be Dead and 2023’s Crazymad, For Me—to get a sense of that encyclopedic knowledge I glimpsed in conversation, sweeping everything from outlaw countrymen to the lush “Nashville sound” of the ‘50s (think Patsy Cline) to campy glam-pop to contemporary Top 40 (she credits advice she received from Charli XCX at a fan listening event as the impetus to her getting serious about making music) into a singular style. Much of this education and clear obsession with the form seems to have happened in her teenage bedroom, waiting for real life to happen. At one point, we find we shared at least one peculiar childhood hobby: “Clocking in after school to fight with random old men on Beatles forums,” in her words. (“Which one was your favorite?” she asks me, awaiting my sheepish reply of “John.” “Same,” she nods, before adding conspiratorially, as if the McCartney camp has eyes and ears stashed in the swanky hotel walls, “and I know that’s not in vogue now, because you know who the algorithm has been pushing these days.”) These accumulated sources of inspiration manifest sonically, but also in a reputation for being a powerhouse performer, built upon a storied history of taking the painful emotional concerns of her songs and blowing them up to something worthy of kitschy, maximalist expression—no marking it, ever.
“I really care about presentation,” she agrees. “[Coming from] somewhat common, middle-class Irish people, you don’t get away with not being entertaining. The whole genre-slash-notion of a guy on stage and a T-shirt and jeans is repulsive to me. I think you can make brilliant, earnest, very serious music, but if I’m gonna pay a ticket to see you fucking live, shake your ass! Do something! I just think you can use power and energy and performance to translate those emotions in the music as earnestly and authentically as [you can] standing there and singing. You can’t just expect me to sit there and be moved by an hour-and-a-half of you, like, pouring your heart out while not moving.
“The opera doesn’t even do that,” she continues, letting a scoff escape with each breath by this point. “They kill each other on stage.”
The question of operatics is an appropriate one to raise, seeing as EURO-COUNTRY stretches the first two releases’ thematic concerns and soundscapes into a widescreen exploration of everything from ever-shifting Irish identity amid financial crisis over lilting pedal steel on the title track (which boasts what is perhaps the most affecting bridge of any song released commercially this past year), to the playfully biting soul singalong of “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” (which finishes the line with a winking “and make me look 16!” before lowering the age with each repeated chorus, as if tightening a vise), to the wind-tunnel rush of “The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station,” marking what might be the record’s biggest sonic leap forward. Unraveling in a firestorm stream of consciousness, all stemming from the songwriter’s petty dislike of the titular English chef, the latter song gradually morphs into an untethered, anthemic primal scream, returning to a “mantra” dutifully repeated like the refrain of a psalm preaching best behavior: “Okay, don’t be a bitch / The man’s got kids / And they wouldn’t like this.”
Each arrangement across the tracklist thrums with immediacy, frequently veering into the unexpected—a melodic idea you thought the song had abandoned will return, or a screeching fiddle will introduce itself in the final turn of a verse, or stacked vocals will emerge to tower over an already stirring chorus. However, if you ask CMAT about the writing and recording process, completed in partnership with producer Oli Deakin, the final version you hear of any given track is the product of hours spent agonizing over it, trying out different ways to perform or arrange the song or tweaking each detectable intricacy in the sound until the team decided it fit. She retells a story she had told a sold-out crowd at Webster Hall after the album’s release, where initial frustrations came to a head while writing songs in Brooklyn and she began hallucinating, believing bugs had infested the Bed-Stuy apartment she’d been staying in.
In hindsight, she references the incident as a turning point, vowing to rely on instinct in order to finish the work with everyone’s sanity in tact: “I know where I’ve made mistakes before, and I know what not to do, but I also know that you can’t over intellectualize or know too much when you’re making [the record], so you’re fighting that [impulse] the whole time,” she elaborates. “It’s like, I both know too much, but know that knowing too much is bad for the music, so you kind of have to be stupid and smart at the same time. It’s a really difficult thing to pull off.” She points to “Tree Six Foive,” a brooding breakup track that morphs into a square-dance shuffle in its choruses, as an example where she and Deakin tinkered at least “six different versions” of the song, constantly returning to the concern of “thinking about it too much.”
“Nobody knows anything, so you have to try and get everything out of your head and go on gut instinct in a musical way,” she reveals. “This is a part of performance, as well. I think performance is a very underrated part of recording an album. It’s not just that you write and produce an album and Bob’s your uncle, and then you sing at the top of it. You have to become the song, and you have to be you have to reproduce the moment that you wrote the song in the studio in order to pull it off correctly. That’s also true of live music. I can always tell when I see a musician and they’re thinking about something else, or they’re not fully in the song.”
She pauses for a second, before paraphrasing a Josh Groban interview she’d heard while listening to the radio at some point years before (“The best advice comes from the worst places,” she assures me) where he claimed he knows he’s delivering a bad show for the people who paid to see him when he’s reaching the setlist’s final stretch. “And he’s singing ‘Nessun Dorma,’ which is a song about his lover dying, and he’s thinking about what he’s going to have for dinner after the show,” CMAT recalls. “And so you have to, in the studio and on stage, reproduce the instinctive moment of creativity and inspiration that you had when you were making that really good song. If that doesn’t come through at some point during the songwriting process, then you’ve written a shit song, and it’s not worth bringing to the studio. It’s really hard. It’s why so many musicians are so fucking woo-woo, and I’m not woo-woo. And so, knowing that I’m not woo-woo and knowing that I still have to be woo-woo is really difficult.”
SO HOW DOES CMAT tap into that spirit with every single show she performs, especially on her recent run of U.S. shows, where she fell ill over the course of an extensive travel itinerary? “Sometimes, you have to find something else that’s true, and for me, it’s about putting on a show,” she looks up at me, eyebrows raised, “being, dare I say, a showgirl.” We let the reference to a certain artist hang in the air before she throws a completely different name into the mix: “Like, Bruce Springsteen is a showgirl! There’s a guy who takes songwriting seriously, takes live music seriously. I love live music and live musicians and live performers. We don’t use tracks or anything in our show. He’s the most popular Irish artist, even though he’s American. They had to just start building things for him in Ireland every time he came around! The last time, he played a field in Kilkenny that they had to make just for him! 500,000 people went to see him over the course of a week and there’s only five million people in Ireland.”
“We really care about attention to detail and actual authenticity, not earnestness, not anything saccharine, but then also like putting on a fucking show and giving people their money’s worth,” CMAT continues. “People don’t have that much fucking money. People spend time and effort and energy and money to come and see live music. I’m not just gonna sit there and be like, ‘You’re so welcome for me playing you my songs. You’re so welcome for me coming.’ I’m grateful for them and you’re supposed to fucking show it.”
As someone who’s seen CMAT live at least once every time she’s made the trip to New York on tour—from an acoustic set supporting the first album in a 150-cap room to a sold-out, full-production, high-energy show at the aforementioned Webster Hall gig—I can confirm that any set she performs is well worth the price of admission, winning over even the most reluctant members of the press section in the balcony, some of whom had likely only heard a snippet of the singles while scrolling their TikTok feed. As the crowd on the floor rustled with palpable anticipation over the opening piano notes of EURO-COUNTRY’s bleeding-heart, hotel-room-missive of a closer, “Janis Joplining,” you could almost hear the collective whip of heads when the spotlight suddenly whizzed to the back of the room, catching CMAT standing on the bar at the very rear of the showroom to sing her opening lines. An electricity seemed to pulse like a current through each body as she made her way through the crowd and up to the stage, re-contextualizing an isolated ode to a writers’ yearning for true connection (“I don’t need to touch you, just speak to me like I’m your wife or a part of your soul / If we keep these thoughts in our head, babe / They’ll never hurt us, no”) and turning its longing gaze to a group gathered who understand—dancing without touching, knowing these human frailties, no matter how despairing, can be beautiful and worthwhile if only written down and screamed through a live microphone for all of Fourth Avenue to hear.
Despite her hard-won reputation as a touring musician, what those attending the shows for EURO-COUNTRY have reflected back to CMAT has continued to surprise her—in ways distasteful and morbidly funny, or both at once. She’s performed every song on the record live, save for the unlikely fan favorite “Lord, Let That Tesla Crash,” a devastating ballad recalling the death of a friend and the impact they had on her life: “That song is actually very real for me, because it’s about grief,” she admits. “It’s very easy for me to tap into the actual emotion of it, because it’s so black and white about what it is, that the minute you start performing it, you go back to the moment that you find out your friend died. I always knew I was never gonna be able to do it live. I tried once, and I broke down and couldn’t finish the song.”
Then, on a later tour date in Newcastle in the U.K., the song crept up on her again through the prism of a fan in the front row. “Some poor girl,” CMAT remembers, “she was, like, 15, holding up a sign like she was at a wrestling match, the whole time—gel pen, glitter, and a little illustration of a car saying, ‘Lord, Let That Tesla Crash right into the setlist!’” She takes on a jokey voice, relishing her chance to recall the poster text as if she’s told the story before, clearly amused by the absurdity of the situation as I feel my own jaw drop for a second and have to will myself to close it. “I think it’s so funny. Like, it’s deeply offensive and traumatizing and disrespectful, and I actually love that. I will never perform it live, and they’re like, ‘Time to play the song, diva boots!’”
“There is something deeply true, maybe, of the CMAT fan base there,” she muses. “I say that because the people that are obsessive and come to my shows—I find them very easy to get along with. I haven’t had any weirdness, really. I think they’re all deeply comfortable with the worst parts of the human experience, and [have found] coping mechanisms like humor and camp and performance and all this. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve tried to allow myself to become more sensitive, because I was very, very, very, very, very bad at earnestness and talking about my actual emotions. Even though that [jokiness] is really good on stage and for touring and press and being a pop star, it’s actually bad in your personal life. I got in trouble in a couple of dating situations because I was like, ‘I don’t fucking care about anything,’ and you hurt people that way. The fan base is still desensitized in the way that I was, and I’m hoping that maybe, in a couple years, they come along with me and they’re willing to be a bit more sensitive.”
“But right now,” she continues, with a genuine, affectionate smile on her face, “I just think it’s really funny.” Surely, an action so misguided coming from someone so young is done out of love—the fumbling, cockeyed movements we make before we have full command of our bodies, in an effort to make contact with anyone that will understand or move to make the same fumbling motion of love in return—I assure her.
“Oh, of course. They understand me better than I understand myself,” she agrees. “You can never assume that you know more things than the audience. That’s what I’ve learned, because the thing is,” her eyes widen, looking around again like someone might be listening, might be on to her game, spinning our daily terrors into songcraft worthy of the Great American Songbook and sending it skyward into a tower of song, “I think maybe they know that I’m gonna roll right back into being the Joker no matter what.”
I can only assume these fans at the barrier, covered in glitter and perhaps once caught under an all-seeing deity’s thumb and deemed one of them, have fallen to their knees in all different versions of my creaky wooden pews that held the weight of my stain, gnashed their teeth at the altar of something that did not recognize their plea. These people, too, may have come to our shared version of evangelism through the gesture of a friend passing one of these songs on as a branch of understanding, of knowing this Irish songwriter—who is now truly the pop star she had once joked about becoming—holds our divine passion in the form of the written word and the body in constant motion, if only to stave off the crush of a world that deems a cunt like me unholy. We have histories of song behind us, carried over with each sigh of “Kyrie Eleison,” so I can feel those women breathe within me and with me. All we have to do is crowd the barriers. All we have to do is open our mouths and scream.
Elise Soutar is a New York-born-and-based music and culture writer.
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