Sarah Doyle
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Dublin-born CMAT is a self-deprecating daydreamer, an artist whose songs bundle big emotions and grand ambition with a comedy writer's understanding of a good one-liner. Her debut album, 2022's If My Wife New I'd Be Dead, took the narrative force of classic country music and crossed it with the intimate, confessional lyrical style favored by her millennial peers. The result was an album filled with songs about feeling lonely, astrology, and bad boyfriends, alongside more fantastical moments including an imagined flirtation with Hollywood director Peter Bogdanovich.
Her new song "Have Fun!" continues the winning formula, acting as a goodbye to a relationship she's not entirely ready to forget. The song's camp chorus ("So have fun, Cuz I’m done") is dripping with disdain but elsewhere there are hints at a softer side that went unnoticed by the guy in question. "Always pecking like a hen," she sings, as if attention is a paltry meal. "That isn't fed, that isn't fed."
"Have Fun!" will appear on CMAT's new album Crazymad, For Me, out on October 13. It is billed as something of a concept album involving time travel and future selves, an intriguing idea, but you suspect she will never get entirely lost in another universe. As illustrated by the way she sings about the cost of living crisis and a London supermarket adorned by green birds here, reality is fantastical enough for CMAT.