Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson might’ve taken the easier path of centering her supposedly difficult third album on pop’s familiarly recurring themes. But it’s 2025, and nobody really has any time for that. Taking country music as an idea just as much as a medium, as CMAT she’s used it’s bones in a way few contemporary performers have dared to, boldy risking self parody whilst in a meta dialogue with fans and not fans.
Her third album, Euro Country is in part, a love-hate letter to an Ireland from which her post financial crash generation are increasingly alienated. Here the proxy titular opener meets it’s tragic downstream effects head on with “All the big boys, all the Berties, all the envelopes, yeah, they hurt me / I was 12 when the dads started killing themselves all around me.”
Thompson hasn’t been the only one to approach this subject recently – as For Those I Love David Balfe mused similarly on Carving The Stone. There’s also a further shall I/Shan’t I on the milder soul tinged Ready, but whilst Running/Planning has an equally approachable twang, Take A Sexy Picture of Me then neatly satirizes the misogynist world of a female pop star. Euro Country‘s peak though comes with the freewheeling, psychedelia tinged The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station, a freak out that underlines the there is no spoon mindset of it’s creator. A new star has arrived, orbiting strictly on their own terms.
You can read a full review here.
The Voice Of Unreason 
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