She may unite two of the mid-2020s most pervasive cultural trends – the so-called “green wave” of zeitgeist-dominating Irish actors, authors and musicians; and the irreverent embrace of country music by pop stars such as Beyoncé, Lana Del Rey and Chappell Roan – but you don’t need to spend much time in the company of 29-year-old Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson to realise she’s a total one-off. Who else would come out with a chugging indie earworm called The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station, in which an irrational hatred of the celebrity chef and his Shell deli franchise (“That man should not have his face on posters!”) leads her to grasp frantically at slippery observations about social anxiety and her own aesthetic sensibilities? Even the most conventional song on Euro-Country, the cool R&B-pop of Running/Planning, is laden with bonkers lyrics about creating an imaginary boyfriend, ripping his head off and then promising to buy said head a Nintendo and “all the games”.
Thompson – who won instant acclaim in Ireland with her 2022 debut If My Wife New I’d Be Dead, and cemented her status in the UK with its Mercury-nominated follow-up Crazymad, for Me – is not kooky in the manic pixie dream girl sense, or leftfield in an alienating radical way. Instead, she is deeply relatable in her weirdness. On the saccharine soul of Take a Sexy Picture of Me, she captures the formative nature of toxic femininity by recounting an attempt to wax her legs with tape aged nine, while on Ready she’s mired in the message – pedalled by Gwyneth et al – that women must engage in infinite self-perfection at the expense of actual living. In Coronation St, waiting for her life to start, over strummed guitar, she feels like a soap barmaid with no lines. In fact, Corrie gets more than one shout-out on her third album, which is enriched by a jumble of cultural references – Dorian Gray, Veruca Salt, Calpol, Kerry Katona – both a sign of camp humour and a voracious mind seeking to explain and evoke thoughts that exist just beyond the fringes of everyday conversation.
One of these emotional landscapes is also geographical: among Euro-Country’s major preoccupations is Thompson’s complicated feelings towards her homeland. Combining mundane regional commerce and gaudy, chintzy folk art, the album cover prods at Ireland’s mystical reputation by depicting the musician stepping out of a town centre fountain in hyper-saturated colour. But then she’s engaging in droll romanticism of her own on opener Billy Byrne from Ballybrack, the Leader of the Pigeon Convoy, which applies an echoey filter and gently building synth backdrop to a recording of a man discussing wind conditions, suffusing his words with a soporific warmth that is at once familiar and otherworldly.
One song later, on the title track and inarguable peak, Thompson is fusing a potted history of the country’s economic woes (“I was 12 when the das started killing themselves all around me”) with sour reminiscences about her own stultifying adolescence in County Meath (“All the mooching ’round shops, and the lack of identity”), all of it relayed in a mixture of beautiful, vaguely yodelly tones, Lana-esque melancholia and chipmunk backing vocals that recall Norwich experimentalists Let’s Eat Grandma. And it’s funny. And it’s catchy.
“I waited for love / With a cricket bat,” begins When a Good Man Cries, a gorgeous dirge that tempers brash fiddle and strains of cheesy 90s country-pop with sublime Fleetwood Mac-style harmonies. Miraculously, Euro-Country’s distinctive lyrics never upstage the music, which is often subtle but just as fastidiously inventive – from Janis Joplining’s maximalist blues to Tree Six Foive’s propulsive goth-folk – and always a great showcase for Thompson’s lovely voice.
Still, Euro-Country is exceptional because of how Thompson constantly strives – sometimes wryly, sometimes earnestly, always entertainingly – to capture messy psychological entrails that don’t fit the template of the typical pop song. Pared-back indie number Lord, Let That Tesla Crash is a tribute to an old housemate who died, but any threat of mindless sentimentality is instantly eviscerated as Thompson admits: “I don’t miss you like I should.” Her grief is tangled with emotional avoidance and unreciprocated affection (a recurring theme); her pain sublimated into fury directed at the Tesla owner who has parked outside their old home. It’s classic CMAT: a roiling sea of charm, chaos, substance, sadness and piercing insight – and yet more proof this nascent star is in a class of her own.
