CMAT is Your New Favorite Pop Star
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If you’ve ever had your heart broken, are partial to the sounds of country music, and love the taste of a crisp can of Diet Coke - you should have heard of CMAT by now. With just one album, If My Wife New I'd Be Dead, the Dublin-born musician has already amassed a cult following. It’s easy to see why: her lyrics hold specific references and personal experiences that many young women seek out. Shame, confusion, despair, all wrapped up in music that could only be written by someone with firsthand experience. CMAT’s songs feel like you’re sitting on the floor with a best friend after a night out, sharing a cigarette and crying with each other - cathartic and brutally honest. It’s not easy to pour your heart out like this, but CMAT has perfected it.
I sat down with everyone’s new favourite pop star to discuss song writing, Irishness, Tumblr and loneliness.
How are you doing?
Good, good. I'm so sorry. I will be eating a bowl of cereal as we chat. Because you know, I'm an adult woman who seemingly can't feed myself before 2pm today. And that's how my life is. But yeah, good.
Don’t worry, that’s completely understandable. So, how does it feel being an Irish pop star in England?
That is such a great first question. I don't think anyone has ever asked me that before. It's hard to separate my songwriting ability from my Irishness. I think being from Ireland is definitely a huge factor in me being a writer, and being so terribly invested in pop culture.
It's interesting to come to England and be willing to let people misinterpret what I am. On one hand I get more respect - I was on the BBC Radio One Playlist before I ever was on an RTE radio playlist. But I think in the UK, I’m respected for being a pop star, a C-grade Dua Lipa. Whereas back home, I think people are more tuned into the lyrics - they get it.
It's weird being an Irish person in England. I get misinterpreted and misread all the time. I'm really, really, really bad at being earnest. If somebody dies, you're cracking jokes at the funeral, but over here you have to follow the rules.
In general English people, opposed to Welsh or Scottish people, are really, really bad at communicating. I'm very willing to point something out that's uncomfortable and be like, Does anyone else see this? Does anyone else have to make peace with this? There’s definitely been a lot of like teenage English girls who have come to my shows and been like, I have never heard anyone talking about this specific, very niche, feeling that I’ve had - so now I have to come to every CMAT concert for the rest of my life.
Country music historically comes back into popularity during times of general struggle for the public. So with country music making a revival - and it intersecting with so many different genres of music this time around - what do you think makes people need country music right now?
I'm actually reading a really good book at the moment called Black Country Music by Francesca Royster. She touches on its revival, and also the reclamation of country music by people who have typically not been associated with the genre in the modern pop culture sense.
I think the reason it’s come back with such a force is because we've been looking at the structure of society in general over the last 10 years. Although country music is typically associated with white conservatives, it actually stems from a rich melting pot of different cultures. And with country music you can address really dark and really hard topics due to the simple, beautiful structure.
Like, “country music is three chords and the truth!” Modern life is very complicated and country music is so refreshing because it's just someone sitting there and talking to you about a specific problem they're having. Songs that are like “We're all in this together!” don’t work anymore because we're all so individualised. We don't live in a community anymore. I think that country music is particularly relevant to loneliness: there's no genre that captures loneliness as well. There's so many reasons for the resurgence of country music, and it's fucking fascinating. I'm just delighted, because I fucking love it.
“Probably one of my biggest motivations is that I really care and worry about fifteen year old girls. Especially the weird ones. Especially the awkward ones.”
I read a quote that you write music for queer people, or 14 year old girls who have no friends and weird hobbies. It really resonated with me. What were you up to as a teenager?
I was really insular. I had no self esteem at all, which I'm sure is very common in teenagers. I spent like six years in my bedroom, on the internet, looking at indie music videos and photoshopping pictures of Bombay Bicycle Club. I ran a fan blog about them, obviously.
Were you a Tumblr girl?
I was a Tumblr girl. I've since deleted all traces of all my Tumblrs, because it was just skinny girls smoking cigarettes, old French New Wave cinema screengrabs and lots of photos of Kelis because I was a really big fan, but that last one is slay to be fair. It was embarrassing to go back and look at my Tumblr from when I was seventeen, because it was so much artifice, it was all these things that I wanted to like and that I wanted to be able to aspire to. Specifically anything skinny and French. I wanted to be cool so badly in a public facing way, but then in a private way I was writing country music. You get dealt certain cards when you're born: which include how you're going to be able to deal with the world and what way your mental health is going to go. And even though it wasn’t true, by the age of twelve I felt like I was the only mentally ill person that existed.
Probably one of my biggest motivations is that I really care and worry about fifteen year old girls. Especially the weird ones. Especially the awkward ones, you know, the ones that would never do well on TikTok. I see them at my concerts, they cry, and they dress up like I do because they're just looking for something to cling on to. And I would hope that my music and the culture that I've built up around is a lot more friendly than fucking heroin chic Tumblr.
You can be interesting without destroying yourself, but when you’re a teenager that feels like the same thing. I relate to that so much. I had a White Stripes fan blog and would beg my family, who lived on a council estate and were working class, to move to California and escape. But I think that teenage experience gives you a unique ability to have so much inspiration. Instead of going outside and being normal, you’re absorbing a library of information from the internet, watching films and listening to music you wouldn't have known about otherwise.
Charlotte, I think we're really lucky because I don't know if that exists anymore. I think there was an eight or ten year period where the internet existed but it hadn’t clocked onto the fact that teenagers were spending all their time on it. So when I looked at the Internet back then, it was curated by other teenagers and obviously had its problems, like heroin chic, skinny, cigarette, little American Apparel bitches, but the scroll of Tumblr was 100% curated by other teenagers and it was based in the long form.
The internet then churned out a very tight generation of cultural encyclopaedias, walking cultural encyclopaedias, and I don't know if the short form TikTok model is going to create that. The odds are stacked against you: That’s why it’s important for me to develop my newsletter because I’m acutely aware of what's happening to people's brains. I wanted to make something that was long form.
We’re almost out of time, let’s talk about your new album!
Please preorder it or they will take me out the back and shoot me!
I'm very proud of my new album. It's really fucking good. It's about time travel, trauma, perspective, and history. We’ve released three singles and the last one did very well, but I still think that the best songs are on the album itself. I have this feeling in the pit of my stomach where I'm like, ‘Oh, God, if people think that “Where Are Your Kids Tonight?” is good, what are they going to do when they hear this song?’ I do genuinely think that the best is yet to come. And so I'm excited for the day that it lands and everyone figures out that I am in fact a genius.
I can’t wait. I’ll be there for your show in Manchester, thanks for chatting with me!
Words: Charlotte Amy Landrum
CMAT’s second album, CrazyMad, For Me is out on October 13th.