- 2025-03-26
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MUSIC
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CMAT Announces New Album “EURO-COUNTRY”, Premieres New Song “Running/Planning” on BBC Radio 1
Irish singer-songwriter Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, aka CMAT is back. She has announced her upcoming third studio album “EURO-COUNTRY” will be released on August 29, 2025.
It is her first album in two years since the 2023 album “Crazymad, for Me”.
From the album, she premiered the first single called “Running/Planning” on BBC Radio 1's New Music Show with Jack Saunders.
The track was written and produced by Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, with production by Oli Deakin.
The accompanying music video was directed by Eilis Doherty.
CMAT said of the song, “'Running/Planning' is about having to chase your own tail to be good enough to exist. It’s an abstracted view of societal pressure on women - specifically through a relationship lens: You start dating someone, you get engaged, you get married, you have kids etc etc etc... everything has to follow this linear pattern. (That’s the reason for the repetitive chorus!). And the minute you don’t follow that path, your mam starts giving out to you. That narrow path that everyone is supposed to be on... the minute you get outside of that, it gets incredibly stressful. And I don’t know anyone who is like, 'Yeah, love this!'”- The new album comprises 12 songs, which she recorded in New York between September and December last year.
CMAT said of the album, “EURO-COUNTRY is, I think, the best thing I have ever made. I felt halfway through recording it was the most important record I’ve made for myself... mainly because it was making me go crazy. I’m always going to make the work I want to make, because there is a little gremlin in my head that tells me if it’s shit. More than success, there’s a bigger gremlin that wants me to make music that’s really good. She’s brutal and has ruined my life at times, but she is the keeper of my life and she’s always right.” -
CMAT told Jack Saunders about the song, “So I'm 29 and a lot of people I know keep getting married and I keep being like, what? And that's essentially the song. I don't know what to tell you about that one. It's kind of this song is weird because it was a complete accident. And it wasn't really supposed to be on the record. And we made it very quickly to try and fill a gap that another song that didn't work was leaving. We probably made and produced it in like a night, like the bones of it. And what's funny is there's two things I was listening to a lot just beforehand, which was the Plastic Ono Band record by John Lennon, which I can kind of hear in it. And then also just Little Simz.”
She continued, “I think the whole point of the song is that I find everybody in life walks in lockstep at each other. So there's a certain amount of milestones that you have to hit, and there's markers that you have to hit in like relationships in your 20s and your 30s. And it's like you find one person, you get married to them, you have kids, then you have real job, then you have real house. And there's all these kind of very linear ways that you're supposed to move through life that can actually be very oppressive if you don't have the instincts to do any of them, which I think I don't. And so it's kind of me ruminating on the end of a relationship and being like, Oh, they all fail because I'm just doing what's expected of me as opposed to what I want to do.”
She said of the album, “I wrote it kind of early to mid last year, 2024 when I was on tour, in between everything. And it's a very heavy record. It deals with a lot of like, loss and pain and grief, and is kind of centered around my relationship with Ireland and kind of exploring, like modern capital isolation and like how the girlies are dealing under these current times that we're in. And it just I wasn't planning on making another record so quickly I wanted to take a break. And then a lot of really sad things happened last year, and it just felt like I had this new sense of urgency, and I wanted to talk about what's happening now. So I made the record. I recorded it in New York between September and December last year. I went a bit crazy. Didn't really see any daylight much of it. It was kind of hallucinating things by the end there love the crazy. Love voices in the head. But it was, I'm really, really proud of it, but I think I kind of slide it.” - source : BBC Radio 1
