Why CMAT Is So Much More than Her Viral TikTok Hit 'Take a Sexy Picture of Me': 'I'm Not Apologetic' (Exclusive) Rachel DeSantisAugust 30, 2025 at 1:00 AM Sarah Doyle CMAT CMAT released her third album EuroCountry on Aug.
- - Why CMAT Is So Much More than Her Viral TikTok Hit 'Take a Sexy Picture of Me': 'I'm Not Apologetic' (Exclusive)
Rachel DeSantisAugust 30, 2025 at 1:00 AM
Sarah Doyle
CMAT -
CMAT released her third album Euro-Country on Aug. 29
The Irish pop star opens up to PEOPLE about her new record, which includes the viral hit "Take a Sexy Picture of Me"
"That is what I want people to take away from the record, is go away from it looking for more connections and looking for more people to fill your life with," she says
Taylor Swift may have put the phrase "life of a showgirl" on the pop culture map earlier this month, but if anyone's living the life right now, it's CMAT.
"My hair is covered in glue. I had five wigs on today for a photo shoot that I did earlier and I haven't gone home yet, so my entire scalp is covered in glue," the Irish pop singer explains to PEOPLE over Zoom. "I never usually wear a headscarf, and I actually don't know why, because it saved me a lot of washing my hair."
Such is life when you're a star on the rise — five wigs, a headscarf and very little time for showering. It's a feeling CMAT (née Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, hence the acronymic stage name) is growing accustomed to, as the Irish singer-songwriter's career takes off with her third album, Euro-Country (out now).
Thompson's latest record, which features the viral, TikTok-approved single "Take a Sexy Picture of Me," has the same country charm and campy candor that made her a breakout success overseas, but covers new, more complex ground, like the fall of the Celtic Tiger economic boom in Ireland, grief over losing a friend and the drag that is being a woman in your 20s.
Sarah Doyle
"I think I make European country music," she says of the album and title track Euro-Country. "I also wanted to talk about Ireland and I wanted to talk about capitalism — not in a way where I'm saying I know more than anyone else, or that I know any solution, but just looking at it and being like, 'What have been the ramifications of this thing for people on the ground?'"
Though Americans may be unfamiliar with country music's scope across the pond, Thompson, 29, who was born in Dublin, says her home country has passionately embraced what they call Irish Country Music, and it remains "incredibly popular" (Standout track "When a Good Man Cries" features a mean fiddle). At age 12, she downloaded Dolly Parton's entire music catalog to her family computer, and jokes that the first tunes she wrote were just "really bad copies of early Taylor Swift country songs."
She's evolved since then, and her music now has the punchy sexuality of Chappell Roan and the sultry crooner sensibility of Amy Winehouse, with a magnetism all her own. But it's really thanks to Charli xcx that she has the career she does today. In 2017, Thompson attended a fan event held by the Brat star, which invited fans to listen to unreleased music and offer their thoughts. Thompson had plenty.
"I was giving my honest opinions, and she seemed to like it. She liked me," she recalls. "She pulled me aside afterwards and was just like, 'What's going on with you? You knew what you were talking about. You seem talented.'"
Charli suggested Thompson, then living in Manchester, move back to Ireland and "make a proper stab at" a music career. And so she did.
"I literally dumped my boyfriend that I had at the time and moved back to Ireland, because she f---ing told me to," says Thompson. "I've worshiped her since I was like, 17. That interaction with her changed my life."
Thompson's debut album, If My Wife New I'd Be Dead (no, not a spelling error), came out in 2022, and the follow-up, Crazymad, for Me, came in 2023, and both topped the Irish albums chart. Just like on her first two records, the lyrics on Euro-Country are often self-deprecating and funny, much as Thompson herself is in conversation.
Case in point: the infectious single "The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station" covers her admittedly irrational disdain for the British celebrity chef and his branded gas station delis ("I needed deli but God I hate him/That man should not have his face on posters"), and later her frustration with herself for being so irritated by him ("Okay don't be a bitch/The man's got kids and they wouldn't like this").
Sarah Doyle
Thompson's songs are relatable, too; on "Coronation St.," she sings about being too tired to make dinner and wondering if her boyfriend actually hates her, while the stunning "Lord, Let that Tesla Crash" was inspired by the loss of a close friend whose death forced her to "take stock" of her life, and ultimately end the relationship she was in. "Running/Planning," meanwhile, is all about the societal pressures put on women to hit certain milestones at certain times.
"There's just loads of things that are on the list of to-do. And if you don't hit any of them, then you're made to feel bad about yourself," she says. "My mother, every time I see her, is like, 'When am I getting a grandchild?' And I'm like, 'I have two No. 1 albums.' I picked a different path."
That path, of course, has led her to critical acclaim (A recent five-star review in the Guardian of her Glastonbury set declared she "will surely be massive") and a fervent fan base charmed by her playful stage presence, brightly colored aesthetic and melding of genres.
So far, the peak of that success has been "Take a Sexy Picture of Me," which took off on TikTok thanks to what fans have called the "Woke Macarena," a designated dance acting out all of the roles women are expected to play. The song, about just how much standard woman's beauty conventions are linked to their age, has been streamed more than 15 million times, exposing her to entirely new audiences — sometimes ones that can only make her laugh.
In typical Thompson fashion, she begins telling a hilarious story about being at her sister's house for her nephew's first birthday party, only to come face-to-face with five young children as she emerged from the bathroom.
"They're standing on me, waiting for me to come out of the toilet. And I was like, 'Hi,'" she recalls. "And they were like, 'Are you going to do the dance?' And I was like, 'I'm going to go and get a drink.' And then one of them was like, 'My mom said that you have to film doing a TikTok dance with me.' And I was like, 'I'm not going to do that, because I don't post videos of children. Thank you so much.'"
Per Ole Hagen/Redferns
CMAT performing at Bergenfest in Bergen, Norway in June 2024
It was a surreal moment, in which her fame had penetrated her personal family bubble. But she takes it in stride, joking that she's now a "party trick" for her sister. She knows, too, that the message of the song likely went over their heads anyway.
"The song is born of nasty comments about my physical appearance coming up on social media. And since the song became a hit song, those comments have gotten 20 times worse, and have increased in frequency 20-fold," she says. "I'm getting this new thing where people are like, 'She looks old. I thought she was in her 20s. She looks like she's in her 50s.'"
She continues, "You get used to it because you start to learn that people's opinions of you are very linked to stuff that's within them. So people call me fat and ugly and old-looking, but that's nothing to do with me. That's to do with the fact that the thing they don't like about me probably has very little to do with my physical appearance and more to do with the way I present myself to the world, where I look like this and I'm fine with it. If I looked like this and I was embarrassed or covered up my body, then they wouldn't care that I looked like this as much. What they care about is the fact that I'm not apologetic about it."
Sarah Doyle
Euro-Country by CMAT
Still, the stream of comments calling her a "body positive icon" have also rubbed her the wrong way; in Thompson's eyes, existing as she is isn't being body positive — it's just living.
"I'm just doing my job, which is musician, and people have either an issue with me or they're like, 'She's so inspirational.' And actually I'm literally just chilling," she says. "I understand why people are doing it, but it is funny that you can't just have a job… I just have a job, which is singing and dancing, and everyone's like, 'Oh, look at the way she looks.' It's crazy."
Right now, that job is keeping her plenty busy. Thompson says she typically will take an eight or nine-month break from writing and recording, then get laser-focused for three months, during which her music becomes all-consuming.
"People have asked me before, 'Oh, are you scared of getting burnt out?' And I'm like, 'I burn out every three weeks. I schedule the burnout,'" she says. "I stay in bed for two days, I cry on the phone to my friends or my boyfriend or whatever, and I watch telly, and I eat two tubs of Hackney Gelato ice cream, and then I go back to work."
Sarah Doyle
In September, she'll kick off a Euro-Country tour in Los Angeles, and currently has show dates scheduled through next June. For now, though, she's just happy that her new album has started making waves. Thompson says she sees the fans online taking the time to explain the more nuanced details of Ireland's political situation to American fans, which she believes sums up the whole point of it all.
"That is what I want people to take away from the record, is go away from it looking for more connections and looking for more people to fill your life with," she says. "Nothing else really matters as much. So I hope that kind of thing continues."
on People
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