CMAT came to Coachella with politics on her mind and an Irish dance step for California

Seven months after the release of country-pop star CMAT’s (Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson) third album, Euro-Country, her image appears everywhere across her home country of Ireland. Murals capture her high, flame-red hair and thrifted gowns. Her face appears on tourist shop merchandise and, as she puts it with typical precision, even on preset Redbubble cushion covers. Her writing, like her persona, thrives on noticing the oddly specific ways cultural saturation shows up.

It’s a culture she’s always longed to play a starring role in. As a child, she wished for fame every time she blew out her birthday candles. Sitting at the Chateau Marmont two days after her debut Coachella set, it seems that wish has finally come true.

Thompson, thankfully, doesn’t act like a famous person. She strolls in without makeup, fresh red hair dye staining her scalp, three glittering studs on her teeth that she flashes while talking as though she’s not being recorded. She hocks back phlegm on a couple of occasions and violently rubs her tired eyes between questions. When she wants to be emphatic, usually when she’s talking about niche British pop stars from the early 2000s, she points at me with a finger gun.

It is an uncharacteristically quiet weekend at the Chateau. Last time she stayed here, she saw Diana Ross, Ashlee Simpson and the back of Kanye West (“the folds of his head are just so distinctive,” she says). Today, the only people in the lobby are a group of women with a brindle dachshund who are comparing enneagrams. The setting is almost too perfect; a little on the nose for Thompson, who says “America is one of the main characters” in her songs.

Thompson has been studying American pop culture her whole life with a kind of Warholian obsession. “I love pop stars, I love famous people, I’m obsessed with them,” she says. She has, and continues to collect, pop star dolls and paraphernalia. “I bought the Selena Gomez Oreos. I’m desperately trying to find the Madison Beer Cheetos,” she says.

Thompson’s fascination with American pop culture developed in part from her youth in post–Celtic Tiger Ireland, when leaders like Bertie Ahern were implementing economic policies shaped by American capitalism. It was a period that, as CMAT agrees, not only Americanized Irish identity but also taught a generation new, imported forms of aspiration and desire.

She returns to this idea constantly in her lyrics, in which Ireland and America blur until the geography itself feels confused. She sings of “the New York skyline and West Cork,” and “Finglas, Tennessee” on “The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station.” She puts it most plainly on Euro-Country: “Trying to be what he wasn’t born/ The pop star, U.S.A.”

“I think a lot of countries in the world are constantly trying to Americanize themselves and look to America because the thing that’s great about it is how much money they have,” she says, “and all we want to be is pop stars and famous people.”

CMAT folded that same Ireland-America overlap into her Coachella set, pausing to teach the crowd the “County Meath” two-step, a dance she invented, named for the little-known part of Ireland she’s from. The California crowd picked it up immediately. “I know you know how to line dance” she said, drawing a line between Irish tradition and American country music culture, the latter shaped in part by Celtic immigrant music.

Growing up in Dunboyne, Ireland — a small village of about 5,000, with a nail salon, a hairdresser, two takeaways and two pubs — Thompson spent summers downloading Dolly Parton’s back catalog onto her pink MP3 player, “which was shaped like a tampon,” she says. Parton is probably Thompson’s closest musical and aesthetic comparison. Like Parton, her lyrics can be unusually bleak — there is one in particular on “Lord, Let That Tesla Crash” that knocks the wind out of me: “I’d kill myself to find out if you think this song is good”— while she presents herself through a kind of authentic artifice: a low-camp persona, gaudy dress and studied exaggeration. It’s a style learned as much from Parton as from the spray-tan glam of her village and early nights in Irish gay clubs with a fake ID. (“Dublin gays are much different from California gays. They’re poor”).

“The gaudiness thing, I think it is gendered in a weird way,” she says. It initially worked against her. “At the start of my career, my publicist pitched my song “Another Day (kfc)” to the Guardian and somebody working there wrote back and said: “Sorry, we don’t cover novelty acts.” That same publication has since eaten its words, describing CMAT as “the sound of 2025.” Last year, when she performed a career-defining set at Glastonbury Festival, in front of tens of thousands of people, it wrote that she would likely return as the headliner.

She’s already strategizing how to make that slot: “I’ll have to really put my nose to the grindstone and make three f— amazing albums.” The ambition is clear, but so is the cost: She’s spent a total of two and a half weeks at home in London this year, traveling so often she no longer gets jet lagged; “going further and further down this dangerous rabbit hole, where if I kept going, I could turn around and realize I’ve not spoken to my mum in six months,” she says. “The trouble is, this is all really addictive.”

There is pressure, from all sides, to capitalize on her success. “The only reason I’m staying at the Chateau Marmont is because my label said they need a non-album single by the end of the year, and because I’m touring, I said I’d only do it if they put me up here for a week.” Instead, she’s been going out for eggs and iced coffee. “I’ve not started the song yet.” Nor does she know how to start one of the “three f— amazing albums” she’s supposed to make. “I don’t know how much more capable I am at this point, because I’ve literally not lived a life for six years.”

Then there’s still America to break. Asked about the first weekend at Coachella, one of her biggest opportunities in the States so far, she’s ambivalent. “The band came off the set miserable because we couldn’t really hear ourselves,” she says, “but our worst shows are most people’s best.” She made a deliberate choice not to include some of her biggest songs, including “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” — a decision that, she says, “members of the CMAT team wanted to shoot me in the f— head” for. Instead, she’s playing entirely different setlists each weekend. “No song will be repeated. People were telling me to do the best songs Weekend 1 because that’s when all the press are there, but I was like, no way, I’m going to do the more annoying songs for them.”

In every regard, CMAT does things her own way. Like fellow Irish acts, including Fontaines D.C. and Kneecap — the latter of whom have faced U.S. visa scrutiny following pro-Palestine statements at last year’s Coachella — CMAT is politically outspoken, shaped from a young age by a country that has suffered from colonization. “I’ve lost brand deals because of it,” she said. Still, despite being at one of the most brand-saturated festivals in the world, she said during her set: “ICE out, free Palestine.”

Behind the viral success and sold-out sets lies a darker struggle: CMAT grapples with the costs of ambition, minimal time at home and complicity in the celebrity culture she critiques.

(Sarah Doyle)

She was clearly tactical about how she said it. “I think it’s really important to get that slogan [‘free Palestine’] correct.” It is the one point in our conversation where she becomes careful and cautious. “Because I think people have …” she pauses, “misspoken, and they have said very, very inflammatory things about that slogan, which has not helped the movement. Anything that might class as hate speech.” I press her to say who she means, but it’s the one time she sets a boundary. “I won’t go there,” she says, gently, with a coy smile. “But I’m just not that girl. I’m anti-war. I’m anti-violence.”

“If they revoked my visa, they’d be wrong to,” she adds. “Because I f— love it here. I love America.”

America is still one of CMAT’s greatest muses, as well as the country that helped develop the dreams she now feels almost guilty for having. “It’s such a difficult thing for me,” she says, “because the thing that’s made me so successful is also an aspect of my personality that I really dislike … I have ambition.”

It’s the engine behind her rise, and the thing she can’t quite make peace with. “I like the level of fame that I have in Ireland now. I want to be successful and have lots of people listen to my music, and I know that’s the wrong reason to do it. At the same time, I wouldn’t have any of the amazing things that I have in my life without it. Capitalism is ruling the world and I’m hugely benefiting from it.”

She’s getting more famous — drawing more and more people away from the influencer pop-ups and into her tent at Coachella — her life, in many ways, fulfilling the very impulse she mistrusts. In every direction, she is struggling to reconcile what she rails against with what has carried her this far. “I’m hugely benefiting from the cult of singular personality, too,” she says, “but I also think these things are bad. I think there’s a loss of community. But what do I do about it? Make a dance record and move back to Dunboyne?”

It’s the only place now, she says, where she can return without being hounded. “Everyone in Dunboyne knows my parents, so they’re too scared to say hello,” she says. “But then when someone’s drunk, they’ll say: ‘You’re putting Dunboyne on the map, girl!’” More than 5,000 miles away, in the pub, they’ll watch the Coachella livestream as a California crowd steps side-to-side to a dance named after them. Maybe it’ll feel close enough.

Seven months after the release of country-pop star CMAT’s (Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson) third album, Euro-Country, her image appears everywhere across her home country of Ireland. Murals capture her high, flame-red hair and thrifted gowns. Her face appears on tourist shop merchandise and, as she puts it with typical precision, even on preset Redbubble cushion covers. Her writing, like her persona, thrives on noticing the oddly specific ways cultural saturation shows up.

It’s a culture she’s always longed to play a starring role in. As a child, she wished for fame every time she blew out her birthday candles. Sitting at the Chateau Marmont two days after her debut Coachella set, it seems that wish has finally come true.

Thompson, thankfully, doesn’t act like a famous person. She strolls in without makeup, fresh red hair dye staining her scalp, three glittering studs on her teeth that she flashes while talking as though she’s not being recorded. She hocks back phlegm on a couple of occasions and violently rubs her tired eyes between questions. When she wants to be emphatic, usually when she’s talking about niche British pop stars from the early 2000s, she points at me with a finger gun.

It is an uncharacteristically quiet weekend at the Chateau. Last time she stayed here, she saw Diana Ross, Ashlee Simpson and the back of Kanye West (“the folds of his head are just so distinctive,” she says). Today, the only people in the lobby are a group of women with a brindle dachshund who are comparing enneagrams. The setting is almost too perfect; a little on the nose for Thompson, who says “America is one of the main characters” in her songs.

Thompson has been studying American pop culture her whole life with a kind of Warholian obsession. “I love pop stars, I love famous people, I’m obsessed with them,” she says. She has, and continues to collect, pop star dolls and paraphernalia. “I bought the Selena Gomez Oreos. I’m desperately trying to find the Madison Beer Cheetos,” she says.

Thompson’s fascination with American pop culture developed in part from her youth in post–Celtic Tiger Ireland, when leaders like Bertie Ahern were implementing economic policies shaped by American capitalism. It was a period that, as CMAT agrees, not only Americanized Irish identity but also taught a generation new, imported forms of aspiration and desire.

She returns to this idea constantly in her lyrics, in which Ireland and America blur until the geography itself feels confused. She sings of “the New York skyline and West Cork,” and “Finglas, Tennessee” on “The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station.” She puts it most plainly on Euro-Country: “Trying to be what he wasn’t born/ The pop star, U.S.A.”

“I think a lot of countries in the world are constantly trying to Americanize themselves and look to America because the thing that’s great about it is how much money they have,” she says, “and all we want to be is pop stars and famous people.”

CMAT folded that same Ireland-America overlap into her Coachella set, pausing to teach the crowd the “County Meath” two-step, a dance she invented, named for the little-known part of Ireland she’s from. The California crowd picked it up immediately. “I know you know how to line dance” she said, drawing a line between Irish tradition and American country music culture, the latter shaped in part by Celtic immigrant music.

Growing up in Dunboyne, Ireland — a small village of about 5,000, with a nail salon, a hairdresser, two takeaways and two pubs — Thompson spent summers downloading Dolly Parton’s back catalog onto her pink MP3 player, “which was shaped like a tampon,” she says. Parton is probably Thompson’s closest musical and aesthetic comparison. Like Parton, her lyrics can be unusually bleak — there is one in particular on “Lord, Let That Tesla Crash” that knocks the wind out of me: “I’d kill myself to find out if you think this song is good”— while she presents herself through a kind of authentic artifice: a low-camp persona, gaudy dress and studied exaggeration. It’s a style learned as much from Parton as from the spray-tan glam of her village and early nights in Irish gay clubs with a fake ID. (“Dublin gays are much different from California gays. They’re poor”).

“The gaudiness thing, I think it is gendered in a weird way,” she says. It initially worked against her. “At the start of my career, my publicist pitched my song “Another Day (kfc)” to the Guardian and somebody working there wrote back and said: “Sorry, we don’t cover novelty acts.” That same publication has since eaten its words, describing CMAT as “the sound of 2025.” Last year, when she performed a career-defining set at Glastonbury Festival, in front of tens of thousands of people, it wrote that she would likely return as the headliner.

She’s already strategizing how to make that slot: “I’ll have to really put my nose to the grindstone and make three f— amazing albums.” The ambition is clear, but so is the cost: She’s spent a total of two and a half weeks at home in London this year, traveling so often she no longer gets jet lagged; “going further and further down this dangerous rabbit hole, where if I kept going, I could turn around and realize I’ve not spoken to my mum in six months,” she says. “The trouble is, this is all really addictive.”

There is pressure, from all sides, to capitalize on her success. “The only reason I’m staying at the Chateau Marmont is because my label said they need a non-album single by the end of the year, and because I’m touring, I said I’d only do it if they put me up here for a week.” Instead, she’s been going out for eggs and iced coffee. “I’ve not started the song yet.” Nor does she know how to start one of the “three f— amazing albums” she’s supposed to make. “I don’t know how much more capable I am at this point, because I’ve literally not lived a life for six years.”

Then there’s still America to break. Asked about the first weekend at Coachella, one of her biggest opportunities in the States so far, she’s ambivalent. “The band came off the set miserable because we couldn’t really hear ourselves,” she says, “but our worst shows are most people’s best.” She made a deliberate choice not to include some of her biggest songs, including “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” — a decision that, she says, “members of the CMAT team wanted to shoot me in the f— head” for. Instead, she’s playing entirely different setlists each weekend. “No song will be repeated. People were telling me to do the best songs Weekend 1 because that’s when all the press are there, but I was like, no way, I’m going to do the more annoying songs for them.”

In every regard, CMAT does things her own way. Like fellow Irish acts, including Fontaines D.C. and Kneecap — the latter of whom have faced U.S. visa scrutiny following pro-Palestine statements at last year’s Coachella — CMAT is politically outspoken, shaped from a young age by a country that has suffered from colonization. “I’ve lost brand deals because of it,” she said. Still, despite being at one of the most brand-saturated festivals in the world, she said during her set: “ICE out, free Palestine.”

Behind the viral success and sold-out sets lies a darker struggle: CMAT grapples with the costs of ambition, minimal time at home and complicity in the celebrity culture she critiques.

(Sarah Doyle)

She was clearly tactical about how she said it. “I think it’s really important to get that slogan [‘free Palestine’] correct.” It is the one point in our conversation where she becomes careful and cautious. “Because I think people have …” she pauses, “misspoken, and they have said very, very inflammatory things about that slogan, which has not helped the movement. Anything that might class as hate speech.” I press her to say who she means, but it’s the one time she sets a boundary. “I won’t go there,” she says, gently, with a coy smile. “But I’m just not that girl. I’m anti-war. I’m anti-violence.”

“If they revoked my visa, they’d be wrong to,” she adds. “Because I f— love it here. I love America.”

America is still one of CMAT’s greatest muses, as well as the country that helped develop the dreams she now feels almost guilty for having. “It’s such a difficult thing for me,” she says, “because the thing that’s made me so successful is also an aspect of my personality that I really dislike … I have ambition.”

It’s the engine behind her rise, and the thing she can’t quite make peace with. “I like the level of fame that I have in Ireland now. I want to be successful and have lots of people listen to my music, and I know that’s the wrong reason to do it. At the same time, I wouldn’t have any of the amazing things that I have in my life without it. Capitalism is ruling the world and I’m hugely benefiting from it.”

She’s getting more famous — drawing more and more people away from the influencer pop-ups and into her tent at Coachella — her life, in many ways, fulfilling the very impulse she mistrusts. In every direction, she is struggling to reconcile what she rails against with what has carried her this far. “I’m hugely benefiting from the cult of singular personality, too,” she says, “but I also think these things are bad. I think there’s a loss of community. But what do I do about it? Make a dance record and move back to Dunboyne?”

It’s the only place now, she says, where she can return without being hounded. “Everyone in Dunboyne knows my parents, so they’re too scared to say hello,” she says. “But then when someone’s drunk, they’ll say: ‘You’re putting Dunboyne on the map, girl!’” More than 5,000 miles away, in the pub, they’ll watch the Coachella livestream as a California crowd steps side-to-side to a dance named after them. Maybe it’ll feel close enough.

Seven months after the release of country-pop star CMAT’s (Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson) third album, Euro-Country, her image appears everywhere across her home country of Ireland. Murals capture her high, flame-red hair and thrifted gowns. Her face appears on tourist shop merchandise and, as she puts it with typical precision, even on preset Redbubble cushion covers. Her writing, like her persona, thrives on noticing the oddly specific ways cultural saturation shows up.

It’s a culture she’s always longed to play a starring role in. As a child, she wished for fame every time she blew out her birthday candles. Sitting at the Chateau Marmont two days after her debut Coachella set, it seems that wish has finally come true.

Thompson, thankfully, doesn’t act like a famous person. She strolls in without makeup, fresh red hair dye staining her scalp, three glittering studs on her teeth that she flashes while talking as though she’s not being recorded. She hocks back phlegm on a couple of occasions and violently rubs her tired eyes between questions. When she wants to be emphatic, usually when she’s talking about niche British pop stars from the early 2000s, she points at me with a finger gun.

It is an uncharacteristically quiet weekend at the Chateau. Last time she stayed here, she saw Diana Ross, Ashlee Simpson and the back of Kanye West (“the folds of his head are just so distinctive,” she says). Today, the only people in the lobby are a group of women with a brindle dachshund who are comparing enneagrams. The setting is almost too perfect; a little on the nose for Thompson, who says “America is one of the main characters” in her songs.

Thompson has been studying American pop culture her whole life with a kind of Warholian obsession. “I love pop stars, I love famous people, I’m obsessed with them,” she says. She has, and continues to collect, pop star dolls and paraphernalia. “I bought the Selena Gomez Oreos. I’m desperately trying to find the Madison Beer Cheetos,” she says.

Thompson’s fascination with American pop culture developed in part from her youth in post–Celtic Tiger Ireland, when leaders like Bertie Ahern were implementing economic policies shaped by American capitalism. It was a period that, as CMAT agrees, not only Americanized Irish identity but also taught a generation new, imported forms of aspiration and desire.

She returns to this idea constantly in her lyrics, in which Ireland and America blur until the geography itself feels confused. She sings of “the New York skyline and West Cork,” and “Finglas, Tennessee” on “The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station.” She puts it most plainly on Euro-Country: “Trying to be what he wasn’t born/ The pop star, U.S.A.”

“I think a lot of countries in the world are constantly trying to Americanize themselves and look to America because the thing that’s great about it is how much money they have,” she says, “and all we want to be is pop stars and famous people.”

CMAT folded that same Ireland-America overlap into her Coachella set, pausing to teach the crowd the “County Meath” two-step, a dance she invented, named for the little-known part of Ireland she’s from. The California crowd picked it up immediately. “I know you know how to line dance” she said, drawing a line between Irish tradition and American country music culture, the latter shaped in part by Celtic immigrant music.

Growing up in Dunboyne, Ireland — a small village of about 5,000, with a nail salon, a hairdresser, two takeaways and two pubs — Thompson spent summers downloading Dolly Parton’s back catalog onto her pink MP3 player, “which was shaped like a tampon,” she says. Parton is probably Thompson’s closest musical and aesthetic comparison. Like Parton, her lyrics can be unusually bleak — there is one in particular on “Lord, Let That Tesla Crash” that knocks the wind out of me: “I’d kill myself to find out if you think this song is good”— while she presents herself through a kind of authentic artifice: a low-camp persona, gaudy dress and studied exaggeration. It’s a style learned as much from Parton as from the spray-tan glam of her village and early nights in Irish gay clubs with a fake ID. (“Dublin gays are much different from California gays. They’re poor”).

“The gaudiness thing, I think it is gendered in a weird way,” she says. It initially worked against her. “At the start of my career, my publicist pitched my song “Another Day (kfc)” to the Guardian and somebody working there wrote back and said: “Sorry, we don’t cover novelty acts.” That same publication has since eaten its words, describing CMAT as “the sound of 2025.” Last year, when she performed a career-defining set at Glastonbury Festival, in front of tens of thousands of people, it wrote that she would likely return as the headliner.

She’s already strategizing how to make that slot: “I’ll have to really put my nose to the grindstone and make three f— amazing albums.” The ambition is clear, but so is the cost: She’s spent a total of two and a half weeks at home in London this year, traveling so often she no longer gets jet lagged; “going further and further down this dangerous rabbit hole, where if I kept going, I could turn around and realize I’ve not spoken to my mum in six months,” she says. “The trouble is, this is all really addictive.”

There is pressure, from all sides, to capitalize on her success. “The only reason I’m staying at the Chateau Marmont is because my label said they need a non-album single by the end of the year, and because I’m touring, I said I’d only do it if they put me up here for a week.” Instead, she’s been going out for eggs and iced coffee. “I’ve not started the song yet.” Nor does she know how to start one of the “three f— amazing albums” she’s supposed to make. “I don’t know how much more capable I am at this point, because I’ve literally not lived a life for six years.”

Then there’s still America to break. Asked about the first weekend at Coachella, one of her biggest opportunities in the States so far, she’s ambivalent. “The band came off the set miserable because we couldn’t really hear ourselves,” she says, “but our worst shows are most people’s best.” She made a deliberate choice not to include some of her biggest songs, including “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” — a decision that, she says, “members of the CMAT team wanted to shoot me in the f— head” for. Instead, she’s playing entirely different setlists each weekend. “No song will be repeated. People were telling me to do the best songs Weekend 1 because that’s when all the press are there, but I was like, no way, I’m going to do the more annoying songs for them.”

In every regard, CMAT does things her own way. Like fellow Irish acts, including Fontaines D.C. and Kneecap — the latter of whom have faced U.S. visa scrutiny following pro-Palestine statements at last year’s Coachella — CMAT is politically outspoken, shaped from a young age by a country that has suffered from colonization. “I’ve lost brand deals because of it,” she said. Still, despite being at one of the most brand-saturated festivals in the world, she said during her set: “ICE out, free Palestine.”

Behind the viral success and sold-out sets lies a darker struggle: CMAT grapples with the costs of ambition, minimal time at home and complicity in the celebrity culture she critiques.

(Sarah Doyle)

She was clearly tactical about how she said it. “I think it’s really important to get that slogan [‘free Palestine’] correct.” It is the one point in our conversation where she becomes careful and cautious. “Because I think people have …” she pauses, “misspoken, and they have said very, very inflammatory things about that slogan, which has not helped the movement. Anything that might class as hate speech.” I press her to say who she means, but it’s the one time she sets a boundary. “I won’t go there,” she says, gently, with a coy smile. “But I’m just not that girl. I’m anti-war. I’m anti-violence.”

“If they revoked my visa, they’d be wrong to,” she adds. “Because I f— love it here. I love America.”

America is still one of CMAT’s greatest muses, as well as the country that helped develop the dreams she now feels almost guilty for having. “It’s such a difficult thing for me,” she says, “because the thing that’s made me so successful is also an aspect of my personality that I really dislike … I have ambition.”

It’s the engine behind her rise, and the thing she can’t quite make peace with. “I like the level of fame that I have in Ireland now. I want to be successful and have lots of people listen to my music, and I know that’s the wrong reason to do it. At the same time, I wouldn’t have any of the amazing things that I have in my life without it. Capitalism is ruling the world and I’m hugely benefiting from it.”

She’s getting more famous — drawing more and more people away from the influencer pop-ups and into her tent at Coachella — her life, in many ways, fulfilling the very impulse she mistrusts. In every direction, she is struggling to reconcile what she rails against with what has carried her this far. “I’m hugely benefiting from the cult of singular personality, too,” she says, “but I also think these things are bad. I think there’s a loss of community. But what do I do about it? Make a dance record and move back to Dunboyne?”

It’s the only place now, she says, where she can return without being hounded. “Everyone in Dunboyne knows my parents, so they’re too scared to say hello,” she says. “But then when someone’s drunk, they’ll say: ‘You’re putting Dunboyne on the map, girl!’” More than 5,000 miles away, in the pub, they’ll watch the Coachella livestream as a California crowd steps side-to-side to a dance named after them. Maybe it’ll feel close enough.

Seven months after the release of country-pop star CMAT’s (Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson) third album, Euro-Country, her image appears everywhere across her home country of Ireland. Murals capture her high, flame-red hair and thrifted gowns. Her face appears on tourist shop merchandise and, as she puts it with typical precision, even on preset Redbubble cushion covers. Her writing, like her persona, thrives on noticing the oddly specific ways cultural saturation shows up.

It’s a culture she’s always longed to play a starring role in. As a child, she wished for fame every time she blew out her birthday candles. Sitting at the Chateau Marmont two days after her debut Coachella set, it seems that wish has finally come true.

Thompson, thankfully, doesn’t act like a famous person. She strolls in without makeup, fresh red hair dye staining her scalp, three glittering studs on her teeth that she flashes while talking as though she’s not being recorded. She hocks back phlegm on a couple of occasions and violently rubs her tired eyes between questions. When she wants to be emphatic, usually when she’s talking about niche British pop stars from the early 2000s, she points at me with a finger gun.

It is an uncharacteristically quiet weekend at the Chateau. Last time she stayed here, she saw Diana Ross, Ashlee Simpson and the back of Kanye West (“the folds of his head are just so distinctive,” she says). Today, the only people in the lobby are a group of women with a brindle dachshund who are comparing enneagrams. The setting is almost too perfect; a little on the nose for Thompson, who says “America is one of the main characters” in her songs.

Thompson has been studying American pop culture her whole life with a kind of Warholian obsession. “I love pop stars, I love famous people, I’m obsessed with them,” she says. She has, and continues to collect, pop star dolls and paraphernalia. “I bought the Selena Gomez Oreos. I’m desperately trying to find the Madison Beer Cheetos,” she says.

Thompson’s fascination with American pop culture developed in part from her youth in post–Celtic Tiger Ireland, when leaders like Bertie Ahern were implementing economic policies shaped by American capitalism. It was a period that, as CMAT agrees, not only Americanized Irish identity but also taught a generation new, imported forms of aspiration and desire.

She returns to this idea constantly in her lyrics, in which Ireland and America blur until the geography itself feels confused. She sings of “the New York skyline and West Cork,” and “Finglas, Tennessee” on “The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station.” She puts it most plainly on Euro-Country: “Trying to be what he wasn’t born/ The pop star, U.S.A.”

“I think a lot of countries in the world are constantly trying to Americanize themselves and look to America because the thing that’s great about it is how much money they have,” she says, “and all we want to be is pop stars and famous people.”

CMAT folded that same Ireland-America overlap into her Coachella set, pausing to teach the crowd the “County Meath” two-step, a dance she invented, named for the little-known part of Ireland she’s from. The California crowd picked it up immediately. “I know you know how to line dance” she said, drawing a line between Irish tradition and American country music culture, the latter shaped in part by Celtic immigrant music.

Growing up in Dunboyne, Ireland — a small village of about 5,000, with a nail salon, a hairdresser, two takeaways and two pubs — Thompson spent summers downloading Dolly Parton’s back catalog onto her pink MP3 player, “which was shaped like a tampon,” she says. Parton is probably Thompson’s closest musical and aesthetic comparison. Like Parton, her lyrics can be unusually bleak — there is one in particular on “Lord, Let That Tesla Crash” that knocks the wind out of me: “I’d kill myself to find out if you think this song is good”— while she presents herself through a kind of authentic artifice: a low-camp persona, gaudy dress and studied exaggeration. It’s a style learned as much from Parton as from the spray-tan glam of her village and early nights in Irish gay clubs with a fake ID. (“Dublin gays are much different from California gays. They’re poor”).

“The gaudiness thing, I think it is gendered in a weird way,” she says. It initially worked against her. “At the start of my career, my publicist pitched my song “Another Day (kfc)” to the Guardian and somebody working there wrote back and said: “Sorry, we don’t cover novelty acts.” That same publication has since eaten its words, describing CMAT as “the sound of 2025.” Last year, when she performed a career-defining set at Glastonbury Festival, in front of tens of thousands of people, it wrote that she would likely return as the headliner.

She’s already strategizing how to make that slot: “I’ll have to really put my nose to the grindstone and make three f— amazing albums.” The ambition is clear, but so is the cost: She’s spent a total of two and a half weeks at home in London this year, traveling so often she no longer gets jet lagged; “going further and further down this dangerous rabbit hole, where if I kept going, I could turn around and realize I’ve not spoken to my mum in six months,” she says. “The trouble is, this is all really addictive.”

There is pressure, from all sides, to capitalize on her success. “The only reason I’m staying at the Chateau Marmont is because my label said they need a non-album single by the end of the year, and because I’m touring, I said I’d only do it if they put me up here for a week.” Instead, she’s been going out for eggs and iced coffee. “I’ve not started the song yet.” Nor does she know how to start one of the “three f— amazing albums” she’s supposed to make. “I don’t know how much more capable I am at this point, because I’ve literally not lived a life for six years.”

Then there’s still America to break. Asked about the first weekend at Coachella, one of her biggest opportunities in the States so far, she’s ambivalent. “The band came off the set miserable because we couldn’t really hear ourselves,” she says, “but our worst shows are most people’s best.” She made a deliberate choice not to include some of her biggest songs, including “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” — a decision that, she says, “members of the CMAT team wanted to shoot me in the f— head” for. Instead, she’s playing entirely different setlists each weekend. “No song will be repeated. People were telling me to do the best songs Weekend 1 because that’s when all the press are there, but I was like, no way, I’m going to do the more annoying songs for them.”

In every regard, CMAT does things her own way. Like fellow Irish acts, including Fontaines D.C. and Kneecap — the latter of whom have faced U.S. visa scrutiny following pro-Palestine statements at last year’s Coachella — CMAT is politically outspoken, shaped from a young age by a country that has suffered from colonization. “I’ve lost brand deals because of it,” she said. Still, despite being at one of the most brand-saturated festivals in the world, she said during her set: “ICE out, free Palestine.”

Behind the viral success and sold-out sets lies a darker struggle: CMAT grapples with the costs of ambition, minimal time at home and complicity in the celebrity culture she critiques.

(Sarah Doyle)

She was clearly tactical about how she said it. “I think it’s really important to get that slogan [‘free Palestine’] correct.” It is the one point in our conversation where she becomes careful and cautious. “Because I think people have …” she pauses, “misspoken, and they have said very, very inflammatory things about that slogan, which has not helped the movement. Anything that might class as hate speech.” I press her to say who she means, but it’s the one time she sets a boundary. “I won’t go there,” she says, gently, with a coy smile. “But I’m just not that girl. I’m anti-war. I’m anti-violence.”

“If they revoked my visa, they’d be wrong to,” she adds. “Because I f— love it here. I love America.”

America is still one of CMAT’s greatest muses, as well as the country that helped develop the dreams she now feels almost guilty for having. “It’s such a difficult thing for me,” she says, “because the thing that’s made me so successful is also an aspect of my personality that I really dislike … I have ambition.”

It’s the engine behind her rise, and the thing she can’t quite make peace with. “I like the level of fame that I have in Ireland now. I want to be successful and have lots of people listen to my music, and I know that’s the wrong reason to do it. At the same time, I wouldn’t have any of the amazing things that I have in my life without it. Capitalism is ruling the world and I’m hugely benefiting from it.”

She’s getting more famous — drawing more and more people away from the influencer pop-ups and into her tent at Coachella — her life, in many ways, fulfilling the very impulse she mistrusts. In every direction, she is struggling to reconcile what she rails against with what has carried her this far. “I’m hugely benefiting from the cult of singular personality, too,” she says, “but I also think these things are bad. I think there’s a loss of community. But what do I do about it? Make a dance record and move back to Dunboyne?”

It’s the only place now, she says, where she can return without being hounded. “Everyone in Dunboyne knows my parents, so they’re too scared to say hello,” she says. “But then when someone’s drunk, they’ll say: ‘You’re putting Dunboyne on the map, girl!’” More than 5,000 miles away, in the pub, they’ll watch the Coachella livestream as a California crowd steps side-to-side to a dance named after them. Maybe it’ll feel close enough.

Seven months after the release of country-pop star CMAT’s (Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson) third album, Euro-Country, her image appears everywhere across her home country of Ireland. Murals capture her high, flame-red hair and thrifted gowns. Her face appears on tourist shop merchandise and, as she puts it with typical precision, even on preset Redbubble cushion covers. Her writing, like her persona, thrives on noticing the oddly specific ways cultural saturation shows up.

It’s a culture she’s always longed to play a starring role in. As a child, she wished for fame every time she blew out her birthday candles. Sitting at the Chateau Marmont two days after her debut Coachella set, it seems that wish has finally come true.

Thompson, thankfully, doesn’t act like a famous person. She strolls in without makeup, fresh red hair dye staining her scalp, three glittering studs on her teeth that she flashes while talking as though she’s not being recorded. She hocks back phlegm on a couple of occasions and violently rubs her tired eyes between questions. When she wants to be emphatic, usually when she’s talking about niche British pop stars from the early 2000s, she points at me with a finger gun.

It is an uncharacteristically quiet weekend at the Chateau. Last time she stayed here, she saw Diana Ross, Ashlee Simpson and the back of Kanye West (“the folds of his head are just so distinctive,” she says). Today, the only people in the lobby are a group of women with a brindle dachshund who are comparing enneagrams. The setting is almost too perfect; a little on the nose for Thompson, who says “America is one of the main characters” in her songs.

Thompson has been studying American pop culture her whole life with a kind of Warholian obsession. “I love pop stars, I love famous people, I’m obsessed with them,” she says. She has, and continues to collect, pop star dolls and paraphernalia. “I bought the Selena Gomez Oreos. I’m desperately trying to find the Madison Beer Cheetos,” she says.

Thompson’s fascination with American pop culture developed in part from her youth in post–Celtic Tiger Ireland, when leaders like Bertie Ahern were implementing economic policies shaped by American capitalism. It was a period that, as CMAT agrees, not only Americanized Irish identity but also taught a generation new, imported forms of aspiration and desire.

She returns to this idea constantly in her lyrics, in which Ireland and America blur until the geography itself feels confused. She sings of “the New York skyline and West Cork,” and “Finglas, Tennessee” on “The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station.” She puts it most plainly on Euro-Country: “Trying to be what he wasn’t born/ The pop star, U.S.A.”

“I think a lot of countries in the world are constantly trying to Americanize themselves and look to America because the thing that’s great about it is how much money they have,” she says, “and all we want to be is pop stars and famous people.”

CMAT folded that same Ireland-America overlap into her Coachella set, pausing to teach the crowd the “County Meath” two-step, a dance she invented, named for the little-known part of Ireland she’s from. The California crowd picked it up immediately. “I know you know how to line dance” she said, drawing a line between Irish tradition and American country music culture, the latter shaped in part by Celtic immigrant music.

Growing up in Dunboyne, Ireland — a small village of about 5,000, with a nail salon, a hairdresser, two takeaways and two pubs — Thompson spent summers downloading Dolly Parton’s back catalog onto her pink MP3 player, “which was shaped like a tampon,” she says. Parton is probably Thompson’s closest musical and aesthetic comparison. Like Parton, her lyrics can be unusually bleak — there is one in particular on “Lord, Let That Tesla Crash” that knocks the wind out of me: “I’d kill myself to find out if you think this song is good”— while she presents herself through a kind of authentic artifice: a low-camp persona, gaudy dress and studied exaggeration. It’s a style learned as much from Parton as from the spray-tan glam of her village and early nights in Irish gay clubs with a fake ID. (“Dublin gays are much different from California gays. They’re poor”).

“The gaudiness thing, I think it is gendered in a weird way,” she says. It initially worked against her. “At the start of my career, my publicist pitched my song “Another Day (kfc)” to the Guardian and somebody working there wrote back and said: “Sorry, we don’t cover novelty acts.” That same publication has since eaten its words, describing CMAT as “the sound of 2025.” Last year, when she performed a career-defining set at Glastonbury Festival, in front of tens of thousands of people, it wrote that she would likely return as the headliner.

She’s already strategizing how to make that slot: “I’ll have to really put my nose to the grindstone and make three f— amazing albums.” The ambition is clear, but so is the cost: She’s spent a total of two and a half weeks at home in London this year, traveling so often she no longer gets jet lagged; “going further and further down this dangerous rabbit hole, where if I kept going, I could turn around and realize I’ve not spoken to my mum in six months,” she says. “The trouble is, this is all really addictive.”

There is pressure, from all sides, to capitalize on her success. “The only reason I’m staying at the Chateau Marmont is because my label said they need a non-album single by the end of the year, and because I’m touring, I said I’d only do it if they put me up here for a week.” Instead, she’s been going out for eggs and iced coffee. “I’ve not started the song yet.” Nor does she know how to start one of the “three f— amazing albums” she’s supposed to make. “I don’t know how much more capable I am at this point, because I’ve literally not lived a life for six years.”

Then there’s still America to break. Asked about the first weekend at Coachella, one of her biggest opportunities in the States so far, she’s ambivalent. “The band came off the set miserable because we couldn’t really hear ourselves,” she says, “but our worst shows are most people’s best.” She made a deliberate choice not to include some of her biggest songs, including “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” — a decision that, she says, “members of the CMAT team wanted to shoot me in the f— head” for. Instead, she’s playing entirely different setlists each weekend. “No song will be repeated. People were telling me to do the best songs Weekend 1 because that’s when all the press are there, but I was like, no way, I’m going to do the more annoying songs for them.”

In every regard, CMAT does things her own way. Like fellow Irish acts, including Fontaines D.C. and Kneecap — the latter of whom have faced U.S. visa scrutiny following pro-Palestine statements at last year’s Coachella — CMAT is politically outspoken, shaped from a young age by a country that has suffered from colonization. “I’ve lost brand deals because of it,” she said. Still, despite being at one of the most brand-saturated festivals in the world, she said during her set: “ICE out, free Palestine.”

Behind the viral success and sold-out sets lies a darker struggle: CMAT grapples with the costs of ambition, minimal time at home and complicity in the celebrity culture she critiques.

(Sarah Doyle)

She was clearly tactical about how she said it. “I think it’s really important to get that slogan [‘free Palestine’] correct.” It is the one point in our conversation where she becomes careful and cautious. “Because I think people have …” she pauses, “misspoken, and they have said very, very inflammatory things about that slogan, which has not helped the movement. Anything that might class as hate speech.” I press her to say who she means, but it’s the one time she sets a boundary. “I won’t go there,” she says, gently, with a coy smile. “But I’m just not that girl. I’m anti-war. I’m anti-violence.”

“If they revoked my visa, they’d be wrong to,” she adds. “Because I f— love it here. I love America.”

America is still one of CMAT’s greatest muses, as well as the country that helped develop the dreams she now feels almost guilty for having. “It’s such a difficult thing for me,” she says, “because the thing that’s made me so successful is also an aspect of my personality that I really dislike … I have ambition.”

It’s the engine behind her rise, and the thing she can’t quite make peace with. “I like the level of fame that I have in Ireland now. I want to be successful and have lots of people listen to my music, and I know that’s the wrong reason to do it. At the same time, I wouldn’t have any of the amazing things that I have in my life without it. Capitalism is ruling the world and I’m hugely benefiting from it.”

She’s getting more famous — drawing more and more people away from the influencer pop-ups and into her tent at Coachella — her life, in many ways, fulfilling the very impulse she mistrusts. In every direction, she is struggling to reconcile what she rails against with what has carried her this far. “I’m hugely benefiting from the cult of singular personality, too,” she says, “but I also think these things are bad. I think there’s a loss of community. But what do I do about it? Make a dance record and move back to Dunboyne?”

It’s the only place now, she says, where she can return without being hounded. “Everyone in Dunboyne knows my parents, so they’re too scared to say hello,” she says. “But then when someone’s drunk, they’ll say: ‘You’re putting Dunboyne on the map, girl!’” More than 5,000 miles away, in the pub, they’ll watch the Coachella livestream as a California crowd steps side-to-side to a dance named after them. Maybe it’ll feel close enough.

Seven months after the release of country-pop star CMAT’s (Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson) third album, Euro-Country, her image appears everywhere across her home country of Ireland. Murals capture her high, flame-red hair and thrifted gowns. Her face appears on tourist shop merchandise and, as she puts it with typical precision, even on preset Redbubble cushion covers. Her writing, like her persona, thrives on noticing the oddly specific ways cultural saturation shows up.

It’s a culture she’s always longed to play a starring role in. As a child, she wished for fame every time she blew out her birthday candles. Sitting at the Chateau Marmont two days after her debut Coachella set, it seems that wish has finally come true.

Thompson, thankfully, doesn’t act like a famous person. She strolls in without makeup, fresh red hair dye staining her scalp, three glittering studs on her teeth that she flashes while talking as though she’s not being recorded. She hocks back phlegm on a couple of occasions and violently rubs her tired eyes between questions. When she wants to be emphatic, usually when she’s talking about niche British pop stars from the early 2000s, she points at me with a finger gun.

It is an uncharacteristically quiet weekend at the Chateau. Last time she stayed here, she saw Diana Ross, Ashlee Simpson and the back of Kanye West (“the folds of his head are just so distinctive,” she says). Today, the only people in the lobby are a group of women with a brindle dachshund who are comparing enneagrams. The setting is almost too perfect; a little on the nose for Thompson, who says “America is one of the main characters” in her songs.

Thompson has been studying American pop culture her whole life with a kind of Warholian obsession. “I love pop stars, I love famous people, I’m obsessed with them,” she says. She has, and continues to collect, pop star dolls and paraphernalia. “I bought the Selena Gomez Oreos. I’m desperately trying to find the Madison Beer Cheetos,” she says.

Thompson’s fascination with American pop culture developed in part from her youth in post–Celtic Tiger Ireland, when leaders like Bertie Ahern were implementing economic policies shaped by American capitalism. It was a period that, as CMAT agrees, not only Americanized Irish identity but also taught a generation new, imported forms of aspiration and desire.

She returns to this idea constantly in her lyrics, in which Ireland and America blur until the geography itself feels confused. She sings of “the New York skyline and West Cork,” and “Finglas, Tennessee” on “The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station.” She puts it most plainly on Euro-Country: “Trying to be what he wasn’t born/ The pop star, U.S.A.”

“I think a lot of countries in the world are constantly trying to Americanize themselves and look to America because the thing that’s great about it is how much money they have,” she says, “and all we want to be is pop stars and famous people.”

CMAT folded that same Ireland-America overlap into her Coachella set, pausing to teach the crowd the “County Meath” two-step, a dance she invented, named for the little-known part of Ireland she’s from. The California crowd picked it up immediately. “I know you know how to line dance” she said, drawing a line between Irish tradition and American country music culture, the latter shaped in part by Celtic immigrant music.

Growing up in Dunboyne, Ireland — a small village of about 5,000, with a nail salon, a hairdresser, two takeaways and two pubs — Thompson spent summers downloading Dolly Parton’s back catalog onto her pink MP3 player, “which was shaped like a tampon,” she says. Parton is probably Thompson’s closest musical and aesthetic comparison. Like Parton, her lyrics can be unusually bleak — there is one in particular on “Lord, Let That Tesla Crash” that knocks the wind out of me: “I’d kill myself to find out if you think this song is good”— while she presents herself through a kind of authentic artifice: a low-camp persona, gaudy dress and studied exaggeration. It’s a style learned as much from Parton as from the spray-tan glam of her village and early nights in Irish gay clubs with a fake ID. (“Dublin gays are much different from California gays. They’re poor”).

“The gaudiness thing, I think it is gendered in a weird way,” she says. It initially worked against her. “At the start of my career, my publicist pitched my song “Another Day (kfc)” to the Guardian and somebody working there wrote back and said: “Sorry, we don’t cover novelty acts.” That same publication has since eaten its words, describing CMAT as “the sound of 2025.” Last year, when she performed a career-defining set at Glastonbury Festival, in front of tens of thousands of people, it wrote that she would likely return as the headliner.

She’s already strategizing how to make that slot: “I’ll have to really put my nose to the grindstone and make three f— amazing albums.” The ambition is clear, but so is the cost: She’s spent a total of two and a half weeks at home in London this year, traveling so often she no longer gets jet lagged; “going further and further down this dangerous rabbit hole, where if I kept going, I could turn around and realize I’ve not spoken to my mum in six months,” she says. “The trouble is, this is all really addictive.”

There is pressure, from all sides, to capitalize on her success. “The only reason I’m staying at the Chateau Marmont is because my label said they need a non-album single by the end of the year, and because I’m touring, I said I’d only do it if they put me up here for a week.” Instead, she’s been going out for eggs and iced coffee. “I’ve not started the song yet.” Nor does she know how to start one of the “three f— amazing albums” she’s supposed to make. “I don’t know how much more capable I am at this point, because I’ve literally not lived a life for six years.”

Then there’s still America to break. Asked about the first weekend at Coachella, one of her biggest opportunities in the States so far, she’s ambivalent. “The band came off the set miserable because we couldn’t really hear ourselves,” she says, “but our worst shows are most people’s best.” She made a deliberate choice not to include some of her biggest songs, including “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” — a decision that, she says, “members of the CMAT team wanted to shoot me in the f— head” for. Instead, she’s playing entirely different setlists each weekend. “No song will be repeated. People were telling me to do the best songs Weekend 1 because that’s when all the press are there, but I was like, no way, I’m going to do the more annoying songs for them.”

In every regard, CMAT does things her own way. Like fellow Irish acts, including Fontaines D.C. and Kneecap — the latter of whom have faced U.S. visa scrutiny following pro-Palestine statements at last year’s Coachella — CMAT is politically outspoken, shaped from a young age by a country that has suffered from colonization. “I’ve lost brand deals because of it,” she said. Still, despite being at one of the most brand-saturated festivals in the world, she said during her set: “ICE out, free Palestine.”

Behind the viral success and sold-out sets lies a darker struggle: CMAT grapples with the costs of ambition, minimal time at home and complicity in the celebrity culture she critiques.

(Sarah Doyle)

She was clearly tactical about how she said it. “I think it’s really important to get that slogan [‘free Palestine’] correct.” It is the one point in our conversation where she becomes careful and cautious. “Because I think people have …” she pauses, “misspoken, and they have said very, very inflammatory things about that slogan, which has not helped the movement. Anything that might class as hate speech.” I press her to say who she means, but it’s the one time she sets a boundary. “I won’t go there,” she says, gently, with a coy smile. “But I’m just not that girl. I’m anti-war. I’m anti-violence.”

“If they revoked my visa, they’d be wrong to,” she adds. “Because I f— love it here. I love America.”

America is still one of CMAT’s greatest muses, as well as the country that helped develop the dreams she now feels almost guilty for having. “It’s such a difficult thing for me,” she says, “because the thing that’s made me so successful is also an aspect of my personality that I really dislike … I have ambition.”

It’s the engine behind her rise, and the thing she can’t quite make peace with. “I like the level of fame that I have in Ireland now. I want to be successful and have lots of people listen to my music, and I know that’s the wrong reason to do it. At the same time, I wouldn’t have any of the amazing things that I have in my life without it. Capitalism is ruling the world and I’m hugely benefiting from it.”

She’s getting more famous — drawing more and more people away from the influencer pop-ups and into her tent at Coachella — her life, in many ways, fulfilling the very impulse she mistrusts. In every direction, she is struggling to reconcile what she rails against with what has carried her this far. “I’m hugely benefiting from the cult of singular personality, too,” she says, “but I also think these things are bad. I think there’s a loss of community. But what do I do about it? Make a dance record and move back to Dunboyne?”

It’s the only place now, she says, where she can return without being hounded. “Everyone in Dunboyne knows my parents, so they’re too scared to say hello,” she says. “But then when someone’s drunk, they’ll say: ‘You’re putting Dunboyne on the map, girl!’” More than 5,000 miles away, in the pub, they’ll watch the Coachella livestream as a California crowd steps side-to-side to a dance named after them. Maybe it’ll feel close enough.

Seven months after the release of country-pop star CMAT’s (Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson) third album, Euro-Country, her image appears everywhere across her home country of Ireland. Murals capture her high, flame-red hair and thrifted gowns. Her face appears on tourist shop merchandise and, as she puts it with typical precision, even on preset Redbubble cushion covers. Her writing, like her persona, thrives on noticing the oddly specific ways cultural saturation shows up.

It’s a culture she’s always longed to play a starring role in. As a child, she wished for fame every time she blew out her birthday candles. Sitting at the Chateau Marmont two days after her debut Coachella set, it seems that wish has finally come true.

Thompson, thankfully, doesn’t act like a famous person. She strolls in without makeup, fresh red hair dye staining her scalp, three glittering studs on her teeth that she flashes while talking as though she’s not being recorded. She hocks back phlegm on a couple of occasions and violently rubs her tired eyes between questions. When she wants to be emphatic, usually when she’s talking about niche British pop stars from the early 2000s, she points at me with a finger gun.

It is an uncharacteristically quiet weekend at the Chateau. Last time she stayed here, she saw Diana Ross, Ashlee Simpson and the back of Kanye West (“the folds of his head are just so distinctive,” she says). Today, the only people in the lobby are a group of women with a brindle dachshund who are comparing enneagrams. The setting is almost too perfect; a little on the nose for Thompson, who says “America is one of the main characters” in her songs.

Thompson has been studying American pop culture her whole life with a kind of Warholian obsession. “I love pop stars, I love famous people, I’m obsessed with them,” she says. She has, and continues to collect, pop star dolls and paraphernalia. “I bought the Selena Gomez Oreos. I’m desperately trying to find the Madison Beer Cheetos,” she says.

Thompson’s fascination with American pop culture developed in part from her youth in post–Celtic Tiger Ireland, when leaders like Bertie Ahern were implementing economic policies shaped by American capitalism. It was a period that, as CMAT agrees, not only Americanized Irish identity but also taught a generation new, imported forms of aspiration and desire.

She returns to this idea constantly in her lyrics, in which Ireland and America blur until the geography itself feels confused. She sings of “the New York skyline and West Cork,” and “Finglas, Tennessee” on “The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station.” She puts it most plainly on Euro-Country: “Trying to be what he wasn’t born/ The pop star, U.S.A.”

“I think a lot of countries in the world are constantly trying to Americanize themselves and look to America because the thing that’s great about it is how much money they have,” she says, “and all we want to be is pop stars and famous people.”

CMAT folded that same Ireland-America overlap into her Coachella set, pausing to teach the crowd the “County Meath” two-step, a dance she invented, named for the little-known part of Ireland she’s from. The California crowd picked it up immediately. “I know you know how to line dance” she said, drawing a line between Irish tradition and American country music culture, the latter shaped in part by Celtic immigrant music.

Growing up in Dunboyne, Ireland — a small village of about 5,000, with a nail salon, a hairdresser, two takeaways and two pubs — Thompson spent summers downloading Dolly Parton’s back catalog onto her pink MP3 player, “which was shaped like a tampon,” she says. Parton is probably Thompson’s closest musical and aesthetic comparison. Like Parton, her lyrics can be unusually bleak — there is one in particular on “Lord, Let That Tesla Crash” that knocks the wind out of me: “I’d kill myself to find out if you think this song is good”— while she presents herself through a kind of authentic artifice: a low-camp persona, gaudy dress and studied exaggeration. It’s a style learned as much from Parton as from the spray-tan glam of her village and early nights in Irish gay clubs with a fake ID. (“Dublin gays are much different from California gays. They’re poor”).

“The gaudiness thing, I think it is gendered in a weird way,” she says. It initially worked against her. “At the start of my career, my publicist pitched my song “Another Day (kfc)” to the Guardian and somebody working there wrote back and said: “Sorry, we don’t cover novelty acts.” That same publication has since eaten its words, describing CMAT as “the sound of 2025.” Last year, when she performed a career-defining set at Glastonbury Festival, in front of tens of thousands of people, it wrote that she would likely return as the headliner.

She’s already strategizing how to make that slot: “I’ll have to really put my nose to the grindstone and make three f— amazing albums.” The ambition is clear, but so is the cost: She’s spent a total of two and a half weeks at home in London this year, traveling so often she no longer gets jet lagged; “going further and further down this dangerous rabbit hole, where if I kept going, I could turn around and realize I’ve not spoken to my mum in six months,” she says. “The trouble is, this is all really addictive.”

There is pressure, from all sides, to capitalize on her success. “The only reason I’m staying at the Chateau Marmont is because my label said they need a non-album single by the end of the year, and because I’m touring, I said I’d only do it if they put me up here for a week.” Instead, she’s been going out for eggs and iced coffee. “I’ve not started the song yet.” Nor does she know how to start one of the “three f— amazing albums” she’s supposed to make. “I don’t know how much more capable I am at this point, because I’ve literally not lived a life for six years.”

Then there’s still America to break. Asked about the first weekend at Coachella, one of her biggest opportunities in the States so far, she’s ambivalent. “The band came off the set miserable because we couldn’t really hear ourselves,” she says, “but our worst shows are most people’s best.” She made a deliberate choice not to include some of her biggest songs, including “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” — a decision that, she says, “members of the CMAT team wanted to shoot me in the f— head” for. Instead, she’s playing entirely different setlists each weekend. “No song will be repeated. People were telling me to do the best songs Weekend 1 because that’s when all the press are there, but I was like, no way, I’m going to do the more annoying songs for them.”

In every regard, CMAT does things her own way. Like fellow Irish acts, including Fontaines D.C. and Kneecap — the latter of whom have faced U.S. visa scrutiny following pro-Palestine statements at last year’s Coachella — CMAT is politically outspoken, shaped from a young age by a country that has suffered from colonization. “I’ve lost brand deals because of it,” she said. Still, despite being at one of the most brand-saturated festivals in the world, she said during her set: “ICE out, free Palestine.”

Behind the viral success and sold-out sets lies a darker struggle: CMAT grapples with the costs of ambition, minimal time at home and complicity in the celebrity culture she critiques.

(Sarah Doyle)

She was clearly tactical about how she said it. “I think it’s really important to get that slogan [‘free Palestine’] correct.” It is the one point in our conversation where she becomes careful and cautious. “Because I think people have …” she pauses, “misspoken, and they have said very, very inflammatory things about that slogan, which has not helped the movement. Anything that might class as hate speech.” I press her to say who she means, but it’s the one time she sets a boundary. “I won’t go there,” she says, gently, with a coy smile. “But I’m just not that girl. I’m anti-war. I’m anti-violence.”

“If they revoked my visa, they’d be wrong to,” she adds. “Because I f— love it here. I love America.”

America is still one of CMAT’s greatest muses, as well as the country that helped develop the dreams she now feels almost guilty for having. “It’s such a difficult thing for me,” she says, “because the thing that’s made me so successful is also an aspect of my personality that I really dislike … I have ambition.”

It’s the engine behind her rise, and the thing she can’t quite make peace with. “I like the level of fame that I have in Ireland now. I want to be successful and have lots of people listen to my music, and I know that’s the wrong reason to do it. At the same time, I wouldn’t have any of the amazing things that I have in my life without it. Capitalism is ruling the world and I’m hugely benefiting from it.”

She’s getting more famous — drawing more and more people away from the influencer pop-ups and into her tent at Coachella — her life, in many ways, fulfilling the very impulse she mistrusts. In every direction, she is struggling to reconcile what she rails against with what has carried her this far. “I’m hugely benefiting from the cult of singular personality, too,” she says, “but I also think these things are bad. I think there’s a loss of community. But what do I do about it? Make a dance record and move back to Dunboyne?”

It’s the only place now, she says, where she can return without being hounded. “Everyone in Dunboyne knows my parents, so they’re too scared to say hello,” she says. “But then when someone’s drunk, they’ll say: ‘You’re putting Dunboyne on the map, girl!’” More than 5,000 miles away, in the pub, they’ll watch the Coachella livestream as a California crowd steps side-to-side to a dance named after them. Maybe it’ll feel close enough.

Seven months after the release of country-pop star CMAT’s (Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson) third album, Euro-Country, her image appears everywhere across her home country of Ireland. Murals capture her high, flame-red hair and thrifted gowns. Her face appears on tourist shop merchandise and, as she puts it with typical precision, even on preset Redbubble cushion covers. Her writing, like her persona, thrives on noticing the oddly specific ways cultural saturation shows up.

It’s a culture she’s always longed to play a starring role in. As a child, she wished for fame every time she blew out her birthday candles. Sitting at the Chateau Marmont two days after her debut Coachella set, it seems that wish has finally come true.

Thompson, thankfully, doesn’t act like a famous person. She strolls in without makeup, fresh red hair dye staining her scalp, three glittering studs on her teeth that she flashes while talking as though she’s not being recorded. She hocks back phlegm on a couple of occasions and violently rubs her tired eyes between questions. When she wants to be emphatic, usually when she’s talking about niche British pop stars from the early 2000s, she points at me with a finger gun.

It is an uncharacteristically quiet weekend at the Chateau. Last time she stayed here, she saw Diana Ross, Ashlee Simpson and the back of Kanye West (“the folds of his head are just so distinctive,” she says). Today, the only people in the lobby are a group of women with a brindle dachshund who are comparing enneagrams. The setting is almost too perfect; a little on the nose for Thompson, who says “America is one of the main characters” in her songs.

Thompson has been studying American pop culture her whole life with a kind of Warholian obsession. “I love pop stars, I love famous people, I’m obsessed with them,” she says. She has, and continues to collect, pop star dolls and paraphernalia. “I bought the Selena Gomez Oreos. I’m desperately trying to find the Madison Beer Cheetos,” she says.

Thompson’s fascination with American pop culture developed in part from her youth in post–Celtic Tiger Ireland, when leaders like Bertie Ahern were implementing economic policies shaped by American capitalism. It was a period that, as CMAT agrees, not only Americanized Irish identity but also taught a generation new, imported forms of aspiration and desire.

She returns to this idea constantly in her lyrics, in which Ireland and America blur until the geography itself feels confused. She sings of “the New York skyline and West Cork,” and “Finglas, Tennessee” on “The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station.” She puts it most plainly on Euro-Country: “Trying to be what he wasn’t born/ The pop star, U.S.A.”

“I think a lot of countries in the world are constantly trying to Americanize themselves and look to America because the thing that’s great about it is how much money they have,” she says, “and all we want to be is pop stars and famous people.”

CMAT folded that same Ireland-America overlap into her Coachella set, pausing to teach the crowd the “County Meath” two-step, a dance she invented, named for the little-known part of Ireland she’s from. The California crowd picked it up immediately. “I know you know how to line dance” she said, drawing a line between Irish tradition and American country music culture, the latter shaped in part by Celtic immigrant music.

Growing up in Dunboyne, Ireland — a small village of about 5,000, with a nail salon, a hairdresser, two takeaways and two pubs — Thompson spent summers downloading Dolly Parton’s back catalog onto her pink MP3 player, “which was shaped like a tampon,” she says. Parton is probably Thompson’s closest musical and aesthetic comparison. Like Parton, her lyrics can be unusually bleak — there is one in particular on “Lord, Let That Tesla Crash” that knocks the wind out of me: “I’d kill myself to find out if you think this song is good”— while she presents herself through a kind of authentic artifice: a low-camp persona, gaudy dress and studied exaggeration. It’s a style learned as much from Parton as from the spray-tan glam of her village and early nights in Irish gay clubs with a fake ID. (“Dublin gays are much different from California gays. They’re poor”).

“The gaudiness thing, I think it is gendered in a weird way,” she says. It initially worked against her. “At the start of my career, my publicist pitched my song “Another Day (kfc)” to the Guardian and somebody working there wrote back and said: “Sorry, we don’t cover novelty acts.” That same publication has since eaten its words, describing CMAT as “the sound of 2025.” Last year, when she performed a career-defining set at Glastonbury Festival, in front of tens of thousands of people, it wrote that she would likely return as the headliner.

She’s already strategizing how to make that slot: “I’ll have to really put my nose to the grindstone and make three f— amazing albums.” The ambition is clear, but so is the cost: She’s spent a total of two and a half weeks at home in London this year, traveling so often she no longer gets jet lagged; “going further and further down this dangerous rabbit hole, where if I kept going, I could turn around and realize I’ve not spoken to my mum in six months,” she says. “The trouble is, this is all really addictive.”

There is pressure, from all sides, to capitalize on her success. “The only reason I’m staying at the Chateau Marmont is because my label said they need a non-album single by the end of the year, and because I’m touring, I said I’d only do it if they put me up here for a week.” Instead, she’s been going out for eggs and iced coffee. “I’ve not started the song yet.” Nor does she know how to start one of the “three f— amazing albums” she’s supposed to make. “I don’t know how much more capable I am at this point, because I’ve literally not lived a life for six years.”

Then there’s still America to break. Asked about the first weekend at Coachella, one of her biggest opportunities in the States so far, she’s ambivalent. “The band came off the set miserable because we couldn’t really hear ourselves,” she says, “but our worst shows are most people’s best.” She made a deliberate choice not to include some of her biggest songs, including “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” — a decision that, she says, “members of the CMAT team wanted to shoot me in the f— head” for. Instead, she’s playing entirely different setlists each weekend. “No song will be repeated. People were telling me to do the best songs Weekend 1 because that’s when all the press are there, but I was like, no way, I’m going to do the more annoying songs for them.”

In every regard, CMAT does things her own way. Like fellow Irish acts, including Fontaines D.C. and Kneecap — the latter of whom have faced U.S. visa scrutiny following pro-Palestine statements at last year’s Coachella — CMAT is politically outspoken, shaped from a young age by a country that has suffered from colonization. “I’ve lost brand deals because of it,” she said. Still, despite being at one of the most brand-saturated festivals in the world, she said during her set: “ICE out, free Palestine.”

Behind the viral success and sold-out sets lies a darker struggle: CMAT grapples with the costs of ambition, minimal time at home and complicity in the celebrity culture she critiques.

(Sarah Doyle)

She was clearly tactical about how she said it. “I think it’s really important to get that slogan [‘free Palestine’] correct.” It is the one point in our conversation where she becomes careful and cautious. “Because I think people have …” she pauses, “misspoken, and they have said very, very inflammatory things about that slogan, which has not helped the movement. Anything that might class as hate speech.” I press her to say who she means, but it’s the one time she sets a boundary. “I won’t go there,” she says, gently, with a coy smile. “But I’m just not that girl. I’m anti-war. I’m anti-violence.”

“If they revoked my visa, they’d be wrong to,” she adds. “Because I f— love it here. I love America.”

America is still one of CMAT’s greatest muses, as well as the country that helped develop the dreams she now feels almost guilty for having. “It’s such a difficult thing for me,” she says, “because the thing that’s made me so successful is also an aspect of my personality that I really dislike … I have ambition.”

It’s the engine behind her rise, and the thing she can’t quite make peace with. “I like the level of fame that I have in Ireland now. I want to be successful and have lots of people listen to my music, and I know that’s the wrong reason to do it. At the same time, I wouldn’t have any of the amazing things that I have in my life without it. Capitalism is ruling the world and I’m hugely benefiting from it.”

She’s getting more famous — drawing more and more people away from the influencer pop-ups and into her tent at Coachella — her life, in many ways, fulfilling the very impulse she mistrusts. In every direction, she is struggling to reconcile what she rails against with what has carried her this far. “I’m hugely benefiting from the cult of singular personality, too,” she says, “but I also think these things are bad. I think there’s a loss of community. But what do I do about it? Make a dance record and move back to Dunboyne?”

It’s the only place now, she says, where she can return without being hounded. “Everyone in Dunboyne knows my parents, so they’re too scared to say hello,” she says. “But then when someone’s drunk, they’ll say: ‘You’re putting Dunboyne on the map, girl!’” More than 5,000 miles away, in the pub, they’ll watch the Coachella livestream as a California crowd steps side-to-side to a dance named after them. Maybe it’ll feel close enough.