What has it felt like to be alive in 2025? The basic answer probably touches on a few aspects of the 21st-century experience. One is the horror and conflict that seem to define the news almost every day. Another centres around the material pressures that increasingly grip supposedly peaceful countries: the never-ending cost of living crisis, and the impossibility for millions of people of a secure job, a dependable home and some halfway viable idea of the future.

Something else demands a mention: the all-pervading mixture of absurdity, nastiness and anger fostered by the internet. Bigotry runs rampant. What we still rather laughably call social media now seem to operate on the basis that the ideal story mixes wildly improbable elements with the kicking-up of moral outrage (witness that ghoulish “online content creator” Bonnie Blue, who, having claimed to have had sex with 1,057 men in 12 hours, ended the year by announcing her support for Nigel Farage). You can check your feed in a mood of mild curiosity, but find yourself instantly pulled into what this results in: great storms of mockery, loathing and polarised shouting.

The biggest prizes seem to go to the high-profile figures who cynically manage to turn all this to their advantage – which is the essential story of everyone from latter-day porn stars, through extremist “influencers”, to the current president of the US. And the resulting noise seems only to increase people’s feelings of anomie and disorientation, particularly among the generation that was born into a world remade by the internet, and then came of age amid the aftershocks of the crash of 2008. I get emails three or four times a week that paint this picture, crisply summed up in a press release from September, sent by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy: “Young people are surviving, not thriving, with many feeling disconnected and pessimistic about their future.”

Journalism can perhaps only scratch the surface. Really evoking and exploring the whole surreal mess is the job of novels, plays, films, TV dramas and records. And when it comes to music, this year has delivered an absolute peach: Euro-Country, the third album by the Irish singer-songwriter Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, better known as CMAT. To quote its 29-year-old creator, “Every song touches on an emotional detail of what it’s like to have come up in this era of capitalism and what it’s done to us all.” It is an album replete with visions of people becoming more and more lonely and alienated, but that also makes a stand for a basic humanity: it aches, basically, and combines its portraits of an increasingly bleak world with an implied insistence that we could all play our part in something better.

Now, you do not necessarily need to know any of this to appreciate CMAT’s brilliance. Plenty of her best songs are about matters of the heart. If you are one of the tens of thousands of people who watched her and her band play over the summer (not least at Glastonbury, where she achieved what music-biz cliche would call a career-defining performance), you will know that she is a flamboyant, funny and self-confident onstage presence, and the pleasure of watching her play live is more about dizzying entertainment than social commentary. But the basic point still stands: the best musicians are always lightning rods for their time, and she is easily 2025’s best example.

Some of the album’s most incisive lyrics are focused on her home country. Fittingly, the cover of Euro-Country portrays Thompson emerging from a fountain at a retail destination near her home town of Dunboyne, in County Meath: where she comes from, she has said, is increasingly a place characterised by “shopping centres and cement and roads”, where “There’s been years and years of basically no social services … and everyone’s just been by themselves on Facebook, scrolling and getting radicalised by the far right.” These things, of course, are evident in lots of other countries. But if you really want to understand how raw economics can be an offence to the human spirit, Ireland might be the perfect prism.

Seven years ago, the Guardian sent me to report on the housing crisis that was then gripping Dublin, and still does. Amid the European HQs of Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and what was then known as Twitter, I experienced a place where, to quote one stock line I heard all over the city, “Homeless families stay in hotels, and tourists stay in houses.” Everyone I met also talked about the “ghost estates” that peppered the country beyond its capital, built in the midst of the so-called Celtic Tiger boom, that were still vacant and had left no end of human wreckage.

This is what Euro-Country’s title track is all about. “It was normal,” Thompson sings, “building houses / That stay empty even now.” She also makes reference to what happened to some people who bought into the dream and were left wrecked: “I was 12 when the das [ie dads] started killing themselves all around me.” That is quite a line to write and sing.

There are other songs that fuse the personal and political. Iceberg is about how insecurity – both financial and personal – breaks people, and about a friend who “used to wanna pick fights and scream about any ol’ thing”, but is now “drowning”. There is a bracing, unsettling examination of the modern male gaze and its sinister consequences titled Take a Sexy Picture of Me. But Euro-Country’s key moment of triumph is The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station, which perfectly captures the queasy, accelerated whirl of the 21st century, and how much it can warp how we relate to each other.

As the writer and critic Dorian Lynskey recently put it, it’s about something quintessentially modern: “the tragicomedy of misdirected anger”. It portrays Thompson pulling in on the motorway for a sandwich, finding an outlet branded with Oliver’s name, and collapsing into a rage that even she doesn’t understand. “I’m wasting my time on seething,” she sings. Her phone is an implied presence: the most barbed lines (“I needed deli but God, I hate him”) might easily have been posted online. And though the lyric is often hilarious, it hints at something incontestably true: the fact that as we rant about other human beings, what really puts us in that mood – which takes us back to housing, jobs and all the rest – grinds on.

I first saw CMAT play almost two-and-a-half years ago. She was performing in a big top at a festival in Shropshire, to an audience of a few hundred. As the show went on, more and more people began to realise the level of talent right in front of us, and responded accordingly. But I now appreciate something else: Thompson does what the best singers and songwriters do, perfectly crystallising their time while inspirationally making a stand against it. In a lot of great art, after all, there is always a sense of defiance. Hers is full of it, which is why it is such a brilliant carrier of something that this year sometimes threatened to snuff out: a very human kind of hope.

• John Harris is a Guardian columnist. His book Maybe I’m Amazed: A Story of Love and Connection in Ten Songs is available from the Guardian bookshop