The making of CMAT’s third album was a fraught business. Holed up in New York, writing and recording the follow-up to 2023’s Crazymad, for Me – which, despite critical acclaim and a Mercury nomination, was pronounced unsatisfactory by the singer herself – Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson suffered what sounds like a pretty terrifying breakdown. “I started actually hallucinating,” she said earlier this year. “I didn’t realise for the first two months that was what was happening, but I basically imagined the entire apartment I was staying in was crawling with insects … I went to the doctor and showed him my bites, and he said: ‘Those are stress hives; you’re mental.’”
One assumes that wasn’t exactly what he said, but you get the gist. And yet, despite its author comparing its recording to “a toxic relationship”, Euro-Country does not sound like it was challenging to make. On the contrary: it sounds like the supremely assured work of a songwriter whose powers have reached a new peak. It is, by turns, poignant, moving, furiously angry, uproariously funny and packed with incredible tunes. It strides confidently away from the country-infused style she minted on her 2022 debut If My Wife New I’d Be Dead, into territory that touches on jazz (Janis Joplining), raging alt-rock (The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station) and soul-kissed pop (Running/ Planning; Take a Sexy Picture of Me) without losing the essence of what made her successful in the first place.
