Album of the week: CMAT keeps it country but sets her sights on the mainstream

Her debut album If My Wife New I’d Be Dead was a critical hit on its release in February 2022. It won the Choice Music Prize and this summer was included in Review’s near-definitive list of the best 50 Irish albums ever made. Her follow-up, CrazyMad, for Me, is even more assured and boasts several songs to appeal to a mainstream audience.

As with the last album, there’s a distinct country feel to several of the songs, including Have Fun!, a track enlivened by fiddles and bar-room piano that mourns the passing of her home town as an affordable place to live. Here and there, the NME’s assertion that she’s “Dublin’s answer to Dolly Parton” isn’t wildly wide of the mark.

The hallmark of this album is eclecticism. Thompson seems to be determined to avoid being pigeonholed. A handful of songs make a play for the big time. One of them, Stay for Something, deserves to be widely heard. An outrageously catchy, faintly Eighties number with its heartland rock guitar, its sparkling wrapping hides troubling subject matter.

In this document of a controlling relationship, Thompson sings about trying “to figure out why I stuck it out/ Looking back, what the hell?/ Five years losing my friends and family/ I lost myself.” But the song’s brilliance is how it charts the conflicting emotions that characterise so many dashed love stories. “You’re just some long lost baby/ Hope you find what you’re looking for.”

Thompson is a keen observer of life’s foibles and while her subject matter can be sombre, she’s determined not to take herself too seriously. Few will be surprised to learn that I… Hate Who I Am When I’m Horny is as irreverent as its title suggests.

It’s not just the song names that make the listener do a double take. Thompson is a lyricist who’s keen to avoid cliché. “My dirty heart in glycerine” is not the line a prosaic singer-songwriter would dream up. It’s taken from lead single Whatever’s Inconvenient, a playful take on a messed up one-sided relationship.

A couple of weeks ago, Thompson played a Patsy Cline appreciation show in Dublin alongside John Grant. The two have made quite a connection and the American troubadour pops up on the evocatively arranged, Abba-like Where Are Your Kids Tonight? Their voices mesh together beautifully. It’s a high point on an album that will surely ensure her vertiginous ascent.

Predicting future success is a fool’s errand, however. Many expected Scottish electro-pop band Chvrches to scale the heights a decade ago, especially when an early single, The Mother We Share, proved so irresistible. But it never quite happened.

Frontwoman Lauren Mayberry is a force to be reckoned with, though, and a couple of recent solo singles hints an exceptional debut album may be in the offing. Her latest, Shame, is a cracker. At its heart is a deliciously skewed pop song with arrangements that toy with the building blocks of industrial rock. Production is from the US songwriter and DJ Matthew Koma.