Flamboyant, furious and full of hope: CMAT is the sound of 2025 | John Harris

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. Illustration: Matt Kenyon/The Guardian The Waterways, an empty and unsold housing development, in Keshcarrigan,County Leitrim, pictured in 2012.Photograph: Cathal McNaughton / Reuters/REUTERS 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...

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