CMAT announces third album ‘Euro-Country’ and shares first single

CMAT has announced her third album and shared the powerful single ‘Running/Planning’.

Euro-Country is Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson’s follow-up to 2023’s Crazymad, For Me, which netted the singer her first ever Mercury Prize nomination. The follow-up is now set to arrive on August 29, before she heads out on a UK/Ireland tour later in the year.

She’ll play the O2 Academy Brixton on October 2 and will wind up at the 3Arena in Dublin on December 3. Tickets go on general sale at 10am BST on April 4 for the UK dates and can be purchased here.

CMAT said of her new single: “‘Running/Planning’ is about having to chase your own tail to be good enough to exist. It’s an abstracted view of societal pressure on women – specifically through a relationship lens: You start dating someone, you get engaged, you get married, you have kids etc etc etc… everything has to follow this linear pattern. (That’s the reason for the repetitive chorus!).

“And the minute you don’t follow that path, your mam starts giving out to you. That narrow path that everyone is supposed to be on… the minute you get outside of that, it gets incredibly stressful. And I don’t know anyone who is like, ‘Yeah, love this!’”

She hailed the album as the “best thing I have ever made,” adding: “I felt halfway through recording it was the most important record I’ve made for myself… mainly because it was making me go crazy. I’m always going to make the work I want to make, because there is a little gremlin in my head that tells me if it’s shit. More than success, there’s a bigger gremlin that wants me to make music that’s really good. She’s brutal and has ruined my life at times, but she is the keeper of my life and she’s always right.”

Speaking to Rolling Stone UK recently, she said of the record: “It was a really really difficult album to make and it took all of my creative juices. I locked myself in a studio in New York for four months and got a bit of scurvy. It sounds really different to the other two but it is very connected spiritually to everything happening in my life right now. I’m really proud of it, I think it’s my best record so far.”

News of the album comes after Thompson hit the road with Sam Fender for his European tour this month, before supporting the Geordie star at his massive UK stadium shows this summer.

“I’m with him a lot this year, I’m going around Europe with him as his solo support, which is gonna make me shit myself because it’s me and my guitar in front of six or thousand people!” she quipped.