Everyone’s favourite global pop star ™ CMAT announces her second album with the catchy, carefree strut of Have Fun!, a sage-burning, fiddle-toting summer smash that’s as much about green parakeets fluttering around London as it is about firmly shutting the door on an era-defining relationship.
CMAT on Have Fun!: “This is a song about ring necked parakeets that are wild in London, but it is also a song about getting over a breakup and moving on from an emotional stalemate even when you don’t, or can’t, forgive the other person’s actions. I suppose it is a song about how things in life are never satisfying, and don’t make sense, but they exist anyway and we have to make the best of it. And have fun!”
Have Fun! - premiered as Hottest Record in the World by Clara Amfo on BBC Radio 1 - is the second single from her just announced second album, ‘Crazymad, For Me’.
The 12-track album - out via AWAL Recordings on October 13 - is a “an abstract break-up album - about what happens when you are still angry about something that happened 10 years ago”. It’s also a concept record of sorts - involving time travel, Belle Epoque Paris and a woman who may or may not be CMAT in the future.
“There’s CMAT and then there’s Ciara. CMAT is just big Ciara: a very, very, very confident version of me. And who is the most competent person in the world and has never done anything wrong in her life, I will never accept that she’s ever done anything wrong,” explains the charismatic, characterful 27-year-old Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, otherwise known as CMAT. In either guise, her off-beat view of the world and gags she makes without missing a beat fill any and every room she’s in. “I don’t do the pop star thing all the time, because that'd be insane and make you go crazy, right?”
When she is doing the popstar thing, CMAT is vibrant red curly hair, coloured dresses, volume and drama with a western-flair. She is giving an incomparable show that reviewers have described as having “unbridled rockstar energy” (Gigwise) and given 5*s (NME). But her upcoming second album CrazyMad, For Me takes popstar CMAT through a reinvention of what came before: this is the grand statement of an ambitious mature sound, a textured sonic feel and details of a complex emotional and metaphorical landscape.
Or as CMAT puts it: “It’s an abstract break-up album… about what happens when you are still angry about something that happened 10 years ago.”
The concept album is about a 47-year-old woman – an alternate CMAT – 20 years from now. She learns how to build a time-machine off YouTube to go back in time to save herself from entering into a relationship so bad it ruined her life. Since it’s built via YouTube it’s a poor piece of machinery and malfunctions, forcing her to spend between five to 50 years in a time desert. Eventually she crashlands in 1890s Paris, with no electricity and rudimentary commodities. “So she’s kind of ruined her own life by trying to save what could have been – but she decides to just go with it,” explains CMAT.
It’s split into three sections, which had initially been marked by interludes but now is just “12 bangers straight down”. “The first section was basically just being angry, this guy fucking sucks, I hate him. The second bit of the album’s like: wait, what if I have actually done something wrong in my life? Crazy concept. The second section is me reckoning with myself. And then the third section is about just accepting that the bad stuff has happened and moving on and having fun making friends.”The storytelling doesn’t sound like anyone else’s – it’s bombastic, grand, full of hooks and picture-painting lyrics projected by her singular vocals – but if you had to take a stab: it’s the mainstream indie she loved as a teenage Bombay Bicycle Club obsessive filtered through 20th century country music, amplified by knowledge of 80s and 90s pop hits with a slide guitar and a camp twist.
“This is music made by a queer Irish person: it’s just gonna have to be funny,” CMAT says of the humour at the heart of her songs. “I feel like a lot of my sense of humour comes from the gays because I’ve never met a gay person that isn't traumatised on some level. Then you can’t just be traumatised all the time. Because that’s miserable. It’s so boring and so annoying. I think that’s a real Irish thing as well: we’re at a funeral but this is the funniest thing I've ever seen. Maybe funeral humour is the way to describe it.”