Ciara, be nice, and you wear too much foundation

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's 50 best albums of 2025.

#2 : EURO-COUNTRY - CMAT

Despite its fraught creation, CMAT’s third album 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 variously touches on jazz (Janis Joplining), raging alt-rock (The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station), soul-kissed pop (Running/Planning; Take a Sexy Picture of Me) – without in any way losing the essence of what made her successful in the first place.

The 24th album I've previously heard and when I met this as a new entry (in the same week I met Sabrina Carpenter and Blood Orange which also made this list), I described it as "interestingly cryptic" so it will be intriguing to see what I make of it on a second listen.

Yeah, I liked it. It starts with "Billy Byrne from Ballybrack, the Leader of the Pigeon Convoy" which is a very peculiar track, sounding like it's played over the PA system at a racecourse. Things get slightly more conventional after that, but there's a load of variety and some very individual lyrics and viewpoints in the amusingly titled tracks including "The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station", "Tree Six Foive" and "Lord, Let That Tesla Crash". She doesn't sound like she's massively content with her lot, but she's honest about things and making an effort to change them where she cans - her outlook reminded me of Self Esteem, without the music being all that similar. It also feels like you'd get more out of this the more you listened to it. 

This managed three weeks in the chart, debuting at #2 - the third album on the list to do so, after Deftones and Addison Rae. The Wikipedia entry tells us it's her third album and has remarkably little else of interest other than the cover art is her emerging from a fountain in the middle of a shopping center near her hometown of Dunboyne, based on Jean-Leon Gerome's 1896 painting "Truth Coming Out of Her Well"- you didn't know that now, did you? Critically, it was very well received, making the top ten year-end in The Economist (why do they review albums?) and being nominated for the Mercury prize and commercially, it got to #1 in Ireland and #90 in Belgium.

discogs.com tells us there are two versions out there that you can drop £120 on - you have the choice of either a signed copy of the green/red split with yellow splatter vinyl or an unsigned, but probably prettier, clear with blue liquid and transparent blue vinyl (it's a double album, so you get one of each). This is an interesting album - I couldn't say I loved it all, but there's a lot to like about it and I feel I should listen to it some more. 

So well done to Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson for winning the album of the round! Seeing what she's done with her stage name there reminds me of a lad in the village when I was growing up who was somewhat less fortunate with his parent's choice of names - he was called Philip-Emanuel O'Flaherty and his sisters took great delight in calling him by his initials. 

#3 - An intriguing album