Difficult second album syndrome? Not if you’re CMAT. The Dublin musician also known as Ciara Thompson announced herself with aplomb back in 2020 with a song about crying in a fast-food restaurant after a break-up. Three years later – and with an award-winning debut album tucked until her rhinestone-gilded belt – she is back with a record that is a little wiser, a little sadder, but no less impressive than its predecessor.
Described as both an “abstract break-up album” 10 years in the making and a “concept record of sorts involving time travel”, Crazymad, for Me sees Thompson laying her heart bare but without losing sense of the sardonic humour that sets her apart from her peers. Her lyric sheet is littered with zingers, pop culture references and quotable lines, from her offhand swipe at “bouncy castle Catholics” to the opening salvo of the savage Whatever’s Inconvenient, where she jests: “I can always smell it coming / Like the grease upon your mullet”.
She is no less forgiving of herself and her ex on songs such as album centrepiece Rent, a mini-odyssey into her former relationship that exorcises her demons in glorious fashion. Running the gamut from tearful regret to melancholia and eventually rage, it evolves from a Jenny Lewis-style intro into a big explosion of colour and sound, as she denounces her former lover: “‘You tainted my teens, and that’s a shame,” she sneers, “I still can’t watch Spirited Away.”
The music is bigger, bolder and brassier this time around, too, with less of an emphasis on the country twang that coloured much of her debut. Instead, these songs teem with luxuriant string arrangements that send tracks like California, Phone Me and Torn Apart careening into the 1970s Laurel Canyon with a sense of gloriously decrepit abandon. As was evident on her debut, however, Thompson clearly knows her way around a pop song, too: Where Are Your Kids Tonight? is an inspired duet with John Grant, their voices working wonderfully together to add drama amid the throb of soft synth-pop. No wonder Robbie Williams himself declared it “majestic”. Such a Miranda, meanwhile, demonstrates her pliable, versatile voice – with tongue-in-cheek references to Sex and the City amid the glimmers of lugubrious beauty and strummed guitar.
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CMAT set her stall out with gusto two years ago, but she has nailed her second album, which expands upon her pop vision and adds depth to the more frivolous aspects of her canon. It’s thrilling to think how far her adventurous sense of creativity could (and should) take her – particularly considering how just two albums in, she is already a bona fide star.
