CMAT, Ireland’s Princess of Country-Pop, Is Ready to Take on America

“It’s in the news, which is not something I’m used to. People are using me as a talking point,” she says. “So to have now released a political song, I feel like I’ve just been fed to the wolves. My manager rang me this morning and was like, ‘Don’t go on Twitter today.’” (Twitter hate aside, reviews published closer to the album’s release have been overwhelmingly positive, hailing Euro-Country as a triumph.)

CMAT is taking it all in stride, despite the urge to google herself to read “all the horrible things people are saying about me.” “Trying to find it funny and trying to find it bizarre is an approach that I’ve taken,” she says. “People willfully misinterpreting stuff that I say and then making it a headline… I just have to be like, ‘This is so stupid and so funny, and it’s nothing to do with me or my art.’”

Euro-Country marks CMAT’s third full-length album in just three and a half years. She credits much of her self-described “prolific” output to the fact that she wasn’t signed to a label until she was 25 years old. “It went from zero to 100 really quickly because I’ve been quietly sitting on a lot of songs. I had a lot to say,” she says. “The last job that I had before I became, literally, a famous popstar was fixing coffee machines in petrol stations over the phone… They’d break all the fucking time.”