Irish pop auteur Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson’s first album, If My Wife New I’d Be Dead, stuck its big hair and rhinestone tiara over the parapet in 2022, winning the RTE Choice Music Prize and wider recognition for its whip-smart, country-tinged songwriting about bad relationships, Virgos and Peter Bogdanovich. Crazymad, for Me doubles down on CMAT’s self-knowing “too muchness” with a meatier sound and more vaulting ambition.
These 12 tracks offer up a dizzying array of pop culture references – Vincent Kompany, Mark E Smith and Rebekah Vardy all feature; John Grant guests – and incorporate elements of time travel in an effort to drill down into one catastrophic relationship that Thompson endured as a much younger woman. “You did this shit to me/Made me brilliant,” CMAT notes on her opening statement of intent, California.
Wit is one of CMAT’s signatures, but even better than the black humour is the portrait of a wiser, but still hopping mad, woman counting the cost of toxic love. Stay for Something channels Stevie Nicks, while the piano-rolling Have Fun! has room for London’s wild parakeets, a fiddle and resilience. Self Esteem’s Prioritise Pleasure is an obvious antecedent, but CMAT’s distinct voice is consolidated here: equal parts “God, self-destruction and a Britney tune”.
