Latest news with #hyperpop
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Kesha's New Record Is a Mess, In a Good Way
It's easy to root for Kesha, which makes listening to (Period.) — her first album as an independent artist, hence its July 4 release date — such a blast. Bookended by pensive moments, (Period.) is a frisky pop record that delights in throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks — while also getting a kick out of any mess that might result from a less-than-successful toss. (Period.) picks up sort of where 2023's Gag Order — her final release on her former label, Kemosabe — left off: The music is shapeless, the wailing wordless. Eventually, the blur begins to clear. 'Freedom,' Kesha bellows, her voice opening wide on the vowels as the instrumentation narrows around her. Finally — after a pitchman-sounding voice trills, 'Narcissism! It makes you happy!' — a beat drops in, and 'Freedom' goes from amorphous to pointed, whirling through post-punk dance-floor raging and gospel-choir riffing while Kesha coolly yet saucily purrs carefree raps like 'Crazy girls are better in bed/Well, I can do one better instead.' More from Rolling Stone Kesha Supports Cassie Following Sean Combs Conviction: 'I Believe You' Kesha Gears Up for Tits Out Tour With Slayyyter, Rose Gray Collab, 'Attention!' Kesha Gets Wild and NSFW in Outrageous 'Boy Crazy' Video Kesha's taste for pop experimentation is in full flower on (Period.), her indie debut well-timed to the long-brewing mainstream break of the hedonistic, neon-hued, kitchen-sink genre known as hyperpop. 'Joyride,' the album's thumping first single, blends norteña accordion blasts, huge backing vocals, and mouth-stretching enunciation; on 'Yippie-Ki-Yay,' Kesha takes over the DJ booth at a honky-tonk, lending her mighty voice to lyrics about 'double-cupping straight gasoline' and adding foundation-rattling beats. Things mellow out a bit as (Period.) draws to a close. 'Glow' is serenely self-satisfied, Kesha's glitched-out voice darting through eight-bit synths. The album ends with 'Cathedral,' a clear-eyed look at survival that's also a reminder of Kesha's gravity-defying vocal prowess. 'Every second is a new beginning/I died in the hell so I could start living again,' she shouts amid droning strings and resolute piano, then declares: 'I'm the cathedral.' (Period.) shows that Kesha is ready to take in all who have believed in her. Best of Rolling Stone Sly and the Family Stone: 20 Essential Songs The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked
Yahoo
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
KATESEYE Release New EP ‘BEAUTIFUL CHAOS': Stream It Now
KATSEYE are ready to pull fans into their latest sonic universe. The six-member girl group unveiled their highly anticipated second EP, BEAUTIFUL CHAOS, on Friday (June 28), marking a bold evolution from the dreamy, melodic pop of their debut. More from Billboard Adrian Quesada's Psychedelic Journey: How the Black Pumas Co-Founder Delved Into Latin America's Romantic Past LL Cool J Gives Fans an NYC Rap History Crash Course in 'Hip Hop Was Born Here' Trailer Teddy Swims Welcomes His First Child With Girlfriend Raiche Wright: 'We Love You Lil Man' Released via HYBE x Geffen Records, the project follows the viral success of lead single 'Gnarly,' which hinted at the high-energy hyperpop and dance-infused direction that now defines the full EP. The project arrives less than a year after the release of SIS (Soft Is Strong), which catapulted KATSEYE to No. 1 on Billboard's Emerging Artists chart and spawned fan favorites like 'Touch' and 'Debut.' But BEAUTIFUL CHAOS is anything but a repeat—this is a new era, louder and more unapologetic. In a joint statement ahead of the release, the group wrote: 'We are so excited to invite you into this beautiful and chaotic world that we have built. Thank you for being here.' The EP showcases the group's global identity—with members from six different countries—and their ambition to break molds within the pop landscape. With producers like Justin Tranter, Andrew Watt, and John Ryan in the mix, BEAUTIFUL CHAOS balances shimmering production with emotional grit, offering an eclectic yet cohesive soundscape. Rather than focusing on chart positions, KATSEYE are aiming for something more lasting. 'We want KATSEYE to be timeless and to have lasting influence. Not just for now—we want forever,' the group said. Listen to BEAUTIFUL CHAOS below. Best of Billboard Chart Rewind: In 1989, New Kids on the Block Were 'Hangin' Tough' at No. 1 Janet Jackson's Biggest Billboard Hot 100 Hits H.E.R. & Chris Brown 'Come Through' to No. 1 on Adult R&B Airplay Chart
Irish Times
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Charli XCX at Malahide Castle: Stage times, set list, ticket information, how to get there and more
Few artists have experienced as transformational a year as Charli XCX did in 2024, buoyed by the release of critical and commercial phenom Brat . Such was the ubiquity of the hyperpop star's album and marketing campaign, a simple flash of slime green, void of any text, is now synonymous with her music. Charli famously described the starter pack for a Brat summer as a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter and a strappy white top with no bra. A host of Grammy and Brit awards later, Charli XCX is landing in Dublin for her biggest Irish show to date. Just over a year on from Brat, there is no sign of the hype wilting. When and where is it? Charli XCX plays Malahide Castle in Dublin on Tuesday, June 17th. READ MORE What time should I arrive? Gates are at 5pm, meaning the show is expected to start at 6pm. Stage times are not yet available, so keep an eye on Charli XCX's social media for updates. The concert should be finished by 10.45pm. Who is playing? Support on the night comes from FIFI and English indie-pop artist The Japanese House . Charli XCX will headline. What songs will Charli XCX play? Brat is sure to feature heavily in Malahide, with a selection of other tracks from Charli's back catalogue. Below was a recent set list from her gig in Paris. 365 360 Von dutch I might say something stupid Club classics Unlock It Apple Girl, so confusing Everything is romantic Speed Drive Sympathy is a knife Guess 365 party 4 u Vroom Vroom Track 10 I Love It How do I get to and from the gig? Though it is possible to drive, you are encouraged to use public transport to get to and from Malahide Castle. Allow yourself plenty of extra travel time, as traffic delays and congestion are inevitable. Travel by bus: Dublin Bus operates services to Malahide village from the city centre. The H2 and 42 routes connect with Malahide, while the 102 provides a direct route from Dublin Airport. [ Brat summer: Annoying, dirty, hedonistic, bra-less, is this the end of the clean girl era? Opens in new window ] Marathon Coaches are offering private, direct return buses to the concert from Northwall Quay Bus Stop 7623. JJ Kavanagh Event Coaches are also offering private coach services from locations including Limerick, Portlaoise, Kilkenny and Carlow. Irish Concert Travel offer a similar service from the likes of Donegal Town, Sligo, Longford and Galway. Travel by train/Dart: Malahide train station is about a 15-minute walk away from the concert venue and connects to city centre dart locations including Grand Canal Dock, Pearse, Tara Street and Connolly. The Dart usually run extra services for concerts in Malahide, with the last train leaving the station sometime between 11.30pm and midnight. Travel by car: There is limited parking at Malahide Castle, but it is possible to drive to and from gigs. You are recommended to book parking by downloading the Evntz app and clicking 'parking' on the page for Charli XCX. Recommended car routes are: Via the M50: From Dublin city centre, west and south of Ireland, exit the M50 at Junction 3 (signposted M1 Belfast/Airport), continuing on to the R139. At the roundabout, take the second exit, continuing on the R139 for 2.6km. Turn left on to Malahide Road/R107. Continue straight for 4.2km, then take a right on to Back Road. Follow signs for car parks on your left. Via the M51: From the north of the country, exit the M1 at Junction 4 (signposted R132 Swords/Malahide/Donabate). Keep right, merging on to the R132. At the roundabout, take the second exit, keeping on the R132. At the next roundabout, take the second exit, again staying on R132. Take a slight left, merging on to Swords Rd/R106, and continue for 2.9km. Turn right on to the Dublin Road/R107, continue straight for 700m and then turn left on to Back Road. Follow signs for car parks on your left. Are there any tickets left? Unfortunately, the gig is sold out, despite Malahide Castle holding an impressive max capacity of 20,000. Keep an eye on Ticketmaster for resale tickets here . Remember to download your tickets on to your phone in advance, in case there are internet or connectivity issues at the site. Screenshots may not work on the day, as Ticketmaster often use live or dynamic barcodes that update regularly. What's the story with security? Attendees under the age of 16 must be accompanied by an adult to be permitted entry. You should bring an official form of identification – a passport, Garda age card or driving licence. Bags will be searched on arrival, and you are advised not to bring a large bag to avoid the possibility of a lengthy delay or even the refusal of entry. Be warned also that it is prohibited to bring alcohol, umbrellas, garden furniture, flares or professional recording equipment in with you. What does the weather look like? Weather is forecast to be largely settled next week, with less rain than usual and above average temperatures according to Met Éireann .
Irish Times
09-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
CMAT: ‘Ireland is a really hard place to live unless you have money, which we didn't'
Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, or CMAT as she's professionally known, says she can clearly remember writing the song that changed her life. She was 22 and having moved from Ireland to Manchester, was working in TK Maxx and, at the weekends, as what she's fond of calling a 'sexy shots girl': 'Cash in hand, £8 an hour, 11pm to 3am, teetering up and down the stairs of a nightclub in the building where Joy Division shot the video for Love Will Tear Us Apart with a tray of Jägermeister shots they'd put a bit of dry ice in – burned your skin if you got it on your hands – selling them for £3 each. Terrible job. And just getting absolutely stoned out of my bin all the time, doing whatever drugs anyone would give me for free. I had absolutely no friends.' An attempt to get her musical career off the ground, 'trying to make hyperpop because I loved Charli XCX so much', had come to nothing. She had just broken up with her 'old, weird' boyfriend and was 'completely alone in a flat in Chorlton, thinking: 'What have I done?' I got really, really, really upset. I kind of looked at myself in the mirror ...' She lets out a snort of laughter. 'I feel like there's so many film scenes where people write songs and I'm like, 'that didn't f**king happen like that', but this one did. So I'm crying, grabbed my guitar and wrote I Wanna Be a Cowboy, Baby! in like 20 minutes. And that was that. I thought: 'I know what I need to do now.'' A couple of years later, I Wanna Be a Cowboy, Baby! was one of a trio of smart, witty, country-inflected songs that catapulted Thompson to lockdown-era fame in her native Ireland, turning her into what she calls 'a big fat pop star' in a matter of months. Her debut album, If My Wife New I'd Be Dead , entered the Irish charts at No 1, its success spreading to the UK, Europe, Australia and the US. Her second, Crazymad, for Me , featured a duet with John Grant and was nominated for an Ivor Novello award and the Mercury prize . Success all happened 'purely because I've got better at writing songs', and came surprisingly easily, she says. 'Whenever someone's like, 'Oh, is it really difficult?' There's parts of it that are difficult, but in general, I'm just like 'This is class, no issue at all. This is great.'' CMAT on Later with Jools Holland. Photograph:BBC Studios / Michael Leckie There's no doubt that CMAT is a fantastic pop star, and you can see why Sam Fender has her opening for him in a series of stadiums. Arriving at her record company offices direct from a photo shoot, she looks extraordinary. Her clothes are a riot of bright clashing colours, her enormous sunglasses initially hide eyes thick with glittering blue make-up: she manages to exude a certain chaotic glamour while eating a pasty as a late lunch. READ MORE She is incredibly forthright on a huge range of topics. She stands up for trans rights – 'If you think of social media as like a video game, you rack up the spoils really high when you decide to go for a group of people who are already at risk' – and confronts the culture of wellness and self-improvement or, as she calls it, 'the rise-and-grind ethic which is making people insane and making them unable to communicate with other people because they're so obsessed with focusing on themselves'. Sometimes she's too forthright for her mum, though: a recent appearance on Adam Buxton's podcast provoked a dressing down. 'She told me it made her cringe: 'That lovely posh Englishman, so well spoken, and you calling yourself a c**t the whole interview. And you're not a c**t, you're lovely.'' And yet, she concedes there has been a significant downside to her breakthrough. 'The kind of head space that good songs come from is one of extreme emotion, extreme depth of feeling,' she says, 'which has an impact on my life. I do live in that really heightened state of emotion all the time. I'm crazy and I do crazy things, and I have crazy relationships with people.' She doesn't mean crazy as in wild or outrageous, she qualifies. She means crazy as in authentically unwell, or – as she puts it with characteristic bluntness – 'mental'. Now 29, Thompson, thinks she has always suffered from auditory hallucinations, but during the making of her third album, 'I started actually hallucinating. I was in New York, writing. I didn't realise for the first two months that was what was happening, but I basically imagined the entire apartment I was staying in was crawling with insects, that I had insects crawling on my skin all the time. I was calling the landlord, letting off bug bombs, I made them throw the couch out because I thought it was covered in fleas. I was itching all the time. I was texting a group chat of friends, sending them pictures of all the bug bites on me: New York's disgusting, full of insects. And they didn't exist. I went to the doctor and showed him my bites and he said: 'Those are stress hives; you're mental.'' (Possibly not an exact diagnosis.) 'I was hallucinating the whole time.' For that reason, she worries that songwriting might not be a sustainable occupation for that reason, or that taking medication might cause the flow of songs to stop. But whatever the pains staked in writing its contents, her new album is superb. It pushes at the boundaries of her previous work's sound: into synth-heavy territory on the title track, pop soul on Running/Planning and distorted alt-rock on The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station, a song during which the constant sight of the TV chef's face in Britain's motorway services seems to bring about an existential collapse in the mid-tour CMAT. CMAT on stage at Fairview Park ,Dublin, last year. Photograph: Tom Honan It arrives in a sleeve featuring its title, Euro-Country, written in the kind of script beloved of Irish-themed pubs, above an exceptionally striking photo based on Jean-Léon Gérôme's 1896 painting Truth Coming Out of Her Well. It features Thompson emerging from a fountain in the middle of a shopping centre near her hometown of Dunboyne, Co Meath . She was born in Dublin . 'Blanchardstown shopping centre,' she says. 'For the first 10, 11 years of my life, it was like my local village. My sister, who lives in Blanch now, goes to the shopping centre every day. You drive there if you want to see other people and then you drive back home again and live in your house by yourself.' That's the reality of much of Irish life, she says. 'There's a kind of space that Ireland is occupying in western media culture right now, a little more fetishised and trendy than it's ever been. Americans think it's cute; English people are like, 'Ooh, I love Guinness and Kneecap and The Banshees of Inisherin , and I'm getting my Irish passport and mmm, I love potato farl.' People talking about Hozier like he's a magical, delicate fairy from the bog. It's a romanticised version of Ireland that doesn't exist. It's a really hard place to live, a really hard place to grow up, unless you have money, which we didn't. So yeah, magical, beautiful, mystical Ireland: it's a shopping centre, that's what I grew up with. A shopping centre.' I'm aware of the fact that my career is going to struggle as a result of this stuff, but I also think everyone else in music needs a kick up the hole Ireland's recent history suffuses Euro-Country, which features vocals in Irish, songs called Billy Byrne from Ballybrack, the Leader of the Pigeon Convoy and Tree Six Foive and a title track that she describes as 'a collage, a mood board' about the financial crisis that engulfed the country in 2008. 'I was about 12 and it all happened around me, it didn't really happen to my family directly,' she says. 'My dad had a job in computers, we didn't really have any money, we weren't affluent, but we were fine. Everybody else on the estate we lived in worked in construction, or in shops, and they all lost their jobs. Everybody became unemployed. Then, in the village I grew up in, there was a year or 18 months where loads of the people I went to school with, their dads started killing themselves because they'd lost everything in the crash.' Initially, Thompson thought she must have misremembered this. 'But I dug deep, did research and the amount of male suicides that happened in Ireland at that time was astronomical. When I hit secondary school, teenage boys started killing themselves as well; that was very common where I grew up. I think it was a kind of chain reaction as a result of the economic downturn. I'm not blaming anyone – no one ever purposely tries to cause that much harm. It's trying to get all this stuff together and think: 'Why did all this happen and how do we stop it from happening again?' I don't have the answer but I think we all need to keep looking at it and really f**king try to hound ourselves into a position where we're not just thinking about monetary gain all the time.' Euro-Country is a noticeably more political album than its predecessors, which tended to focus on relationships and the chaos of her personal life. Thompson says she couldn't really see anyone else in her position doing it, so decided to take it on. 'No one is dealing with capitalism as a force for bad, this really f**king horrible putrefied version of capitalism which has absolutely had a line of coke up its f**king hole since Covid, where the richest people in the world are so much richer than they used to be five years ago,' she says. 'Pop stars won't come out and say that because they'll be absolutely shot for it, because they've all done brand deals: 'Oh, I love my Dove moisturiser.'' [ CMAT in Dublin: A night of real emotion in one of the best gigs of the year Opens in new window ] Thompson was one of a number of artists to pull out of Latitude and other festivals over sponsor Barclays providing financial services to defence companies supplying Israel . She says that as soon as she removed herself from the line-up, an upcoming deal with a designer perfume brand disappeared. 'They ghosted me. I lost a lot of money. But who f**king cares? I'm aware of the fact that my career is going to struggle as a result of this stuff, but I also think everyone else in music needs a kick up the hole. Where's all the f**king artists? Where's all the f**king hippies?' Of course, another reason why musicians might feel abashed about mentioning politics is fear of a social media backlash, something Thompson knows all about. Last year, an Instagram video of her performing at BBC Radio 1's Big Weekend festival attracted so much abuse – largely directed at her weight – that the BBC was forced to disable comments. She laughed it off at the time, suggesting she should be imprisoned for the crime of 'having a big fat ass', but returns to the subject on her current single, Take a Sexy Picture of Me (it has turned into that rarest of things: a song about body shaming that has provoked a TikTok dance trend, with it-girl Julia Fox and Chicken Shop Date host Amelia Dimoldenberg participating). 'Prior to moving over to the UK I would never have thought I was plus size,' she says. 'And then I started working with fashion directors in London for photoshoots and started hearing: 'Wow, you're so lucky I collect plus-size Mugler because no one else will be able to dress you.' I thought: what are you talking about? I'm a size 14! I thought everyone was this size! Why are you being so weird? But truth be told, if someone on the internet calls me a big fat ugly bitch, I'm like 'yeah, whatever', I don't f**king care. But I started realising that other people were witnessing it and other girls, young girls, were witnessing this happening to me on a f**king huge scale – what must they think of that? How is it going to make them feel, particularly if they're bigger than me?' She brings it back to commerce. 'In day-to-day real life, if you think being fat will stop people from ever wanting to have sex with you, let me tell you that is not the case in such an extreme way. I've seen the girlies out there doing unbelievably well for themselves, right? But [because] fatness is not commercially viable, it's not in the realm of commercial attractiveness.' Online, she says, the body image discourse brings out 'weak-willed, spineless people who have been brutalised by commercial viability, criticising someone for not falling within the realms of what is easily sellable'. [ CMAT on launching her second album: 'This has been the great joy of my life to be able to do this' Opens in new window ] Thompson says she is aware that the political bent of Euro-Country is a big ask of audiences in 2025, when pop seems to largely function as a means of temporary escape from a terrifying world. 'It can be read as incredibly cringe and incredibly earnest and on the nose, right? It's an embarrassing thing for me to be asking of people. Because it's not trendy to be earnest any more. I'm aware of that, and ...' She laughs again. 'Actually I don't care. I don't care if I'm putting my foot in it, I don't care if I'm saying something wrong. We've all been too measured, too careful because we're being witnessed all the time. I think we need more willingness to fail. Even if it's futile, you've got to f**king try. Because it's f**king depressing otherwise.' – The Guardian Euro-Country is released via CMATBaby and Awal on August 29th
The Guardian
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
CMAT, pop's gobbiest, gaudiest star: ‘Everyone else in music needs a kick up the hole!'
Ciara Mary-Anne Thompson, or CMAT as she's professionally known, says she can clearly remember writing the song that changed her life. She was 22 and having moved from Ireland to Manchester, was working in TK Maxx and, at the weekends, as what she's fond of calling a 'sexy shots girl': 'Cash in hand, £8 an hour, 11pm to 3am, teetering up and down the stairs of a nightclub in the building where Joy Division shot the video for Love Will Tear Us Apart with a tray of Jägermeister shots they'd put a bit of dry ice in – burned your skin if you got it on your hands – selling them for three pound each. Terrible job. And just getting absolutely stoned out of my bin all the time, doing whatever drugs anyone would give me for free. I had absolutely no friends.' An attempt to get her musical career off the ground, 'trying to make hyperpop because I loved Charli xcx so much', had come to nothing. She had just broken up with her 'old, weird' boyfriend and was 'completely alone in a flat in Chorlton, thinking: 'What have I done?' I got really, really, really upset. I kind of looked at myself in the mirror …' She lets out a snort of laughter. 'I feel like there's so many film scenes where people write songs and I'm like, 'that didn't fucking happen like that', but this one did. So I'm crying, grabbed my guitar and wrote I Wanna Be a Cowboy, Baby! in like 20 minutes. And that was that. I thought: 'I know what I need to do now.'' A couple of years later, I Wanna Be a Cowboy, Baby! was one of a trio of smart, witty, country-inflected songs that catapulted Thompson to lockdown-era fame in her native Ireland, turning her into what she calls 'a big fat pop star' in a matter of months. Her debut album, If My Wife New I'd Be Dead, entered the Irish charts at No 1, its success spreading to the UK, Europe, Australia and the US. Her second, Crazymad, for Me, featured a duet with John Grant and was nominated for an Ivor Novello award and the Mercury prize. Success all happened 'purely because I've got better at writing songs', and came surprisingly easily, she says. 'Whenever someone's like, 'Oh, is it really difficult?' There's parts of it that are difficult, but in general, I'm just like 'This is class, no issue at all. This is great.'' There's no doubt that CMAT is a fantastic pop star, and you can see why Sam Fender has her opening for him in a series of stadiums. Arriving at her record company offices direct from a photoshoot, she looks extraordinary. Her clothes are a riot of bright clashing colours, her enormous sunglasses initially hide eyes thick with glittering blue makeup: she manages to exude a certain chaotic glamour while eating a pasty as a late lunch. She is incredibly forthright on a huge range of topics. She stands up for trans rights – 'If you think of social media as like a video game, you rack up the spoils really high when you decide to go for a group of people who are already at risk' – and confronts the culture of wellness and self-improvement or, as she calls it, 'the rise-and-grind ethic which is making people insane and making them unable to communicate with other people because they're so obsessed with focusing on themselves'. Sometimes she's too forthright for her mum, though: a recent appearance on Adam Buxton's podcast provoked a dressing down. 'She told me it made her cringe: 'That lovely posh Englishman, so well spoken, and you calling yourself a cunt the whole interview. And you're not a cunt, you're lovely.'' And yet, she concedes there has been a significant downside to her breakthrough. 'The kind of headspace that good songs come from is one of extreme emotion, extreme depth of feeling,' she says, 'which has an impact on my life. I do live in that really heightened state of emotion all the time. I'm crazy and I do crazy things, and I have crazy relationships with people.' She doesn't mean crazy as in wild or outrageous, she qualifies. She means crazy as in authentically unwell, or – as she puts it with characteristic bluntness – 'mental'. Now 29, Thompson thinks she has always suffered from auditory hallucinations, but during the making of her third album, 'I started actually hallucinating. I was in New York, writing. I didn't realise for the first two months that was what was happening, but I basically imagined the entire apartment I was staying in was crawling with insects, that I had insects crawling on my skin all the time. I was calling the landlord, letting off bug bombs, I made them throw the couch out because I thought it was covered in fleas. I was itching all the time. I was texting a group chat of friends, sending them pictures of all the bug bites on me: New York's disgusting, full of insects. And they didn't exist. I went to the doctor and showed him my bites and he said: 'Those are stress hives; you're mental.'' (Possibly not an exact diagnosis.) 'I was hallucinating the whole time.' For that reason, she worries that songwriting might not be a sustainable occupation for that reason, or that taking medication might cause the flow of songs to stop. But whatever the pains staked in writing its contents, her new album is superb. It pushes at the boundaries of her previous work's sound: into synth-heavy territory on the title track, pop soul on Running/Planning and distorted alt-rock on The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station, a song during which the constant sight of the TV chef's face in Britain's motorway services seems to bring about an existential collapse in the mid-tour CMAT. It arrives in a sleeve featuring its title, Euro-Country, written in the kind of Gaelic script beloved of Irish theme pubs, above an exceptionally striking photo based on Jean-Léon Gérôme's 1896 painting Truth Coming Out of Her Well. It features Thompson emerging from a fountain in the middle of a shopping centre near her home town of Dunboyne. 'Blanchardstown shopping centre,' she says. 'For the first 10, 11 years of my life, it was like my local village. My sister, who lives in Blanch now, goes to the shopping centre every day. You drive there if you want to see other people and then you drive back home again and live in your house by yourself.' That's the reality of much of Irish life, she says. 'There's a kind of space that Ireland is occupying in western media culture right now, a little more fetishised and trendy than it's ever been. Americans think it's cute; English people are like, 'Ooh, I love Guinness and Kneecap and The Banshees of Inisherin, and I'm getting my Irish passport and mmm, I love potato farl.' People talking about Hozier like he's a magical, delicate fairy from the bog. It's a romanticised version of Ireland that doesn't exist. It's a really hard place to live, a really hard place to grow up, unless you have money, which we didn't. So yeah, magical, beautiful, mystical Ireland: it's a shopping centre, that's what I grew up with. A shopping centre.' Ireland's recent history suffuses Euro-Country, which features vocals in Irish, songs called Billy Byrne from Ballybrack, the Leader of the Pigeon Convoy and Tree Six Foive and a title track that she describes as 'a collage, a mood board' about the financial crisis that engulfed the country in 2008. 'I was about 12 and it all happened around me, it didn't really happen to my family directly,' she says. 'My dad had a job in computers, we didn't really have any money, we weren't affluent, but we were fine. Everybody else on the estate we lived in worked in construction, or in shops, and they all lost their jobs. Everybody became unemployed. Then, in the village I grew up in, there was a year or 18 months where loads of the people I went to school with, their dads started killing themselves because they'd lost everything in the crash.' Initially, Thompson thought she must have misremembered this. 'But I dug deep, did research and the amount of male suicides that happened in Ireland at that time was astronomical. When I hit secondary school, teenage boys started killing themselves as well; that was very common where I grew up. I think it was a kind of chain reaction as a result of the economic downturn. I'm not blaming anyone – no one ever purposely tries to cause that much harm. It's trying to get all this stuff together and think: 'Why did all this happen and how do we stop it from happening again?' I don't have the answer but I think we all need to keep looking at it and really fucking try to hound ourselves into a position where we're not just thinking about monetary gain all the time.' Euro-Country is a noticeably more political album than its predecessors, which tended to focus on relationships and the chaos of her personal life. Thompson says she couldn't really see anyone else in her position doing it, so decided to take it on. 'No one is dealing with capitalism as a force for bad, this really fucking horrible putrefied version of capitalism which has absolutely had a line of coke up its fucking hole since Covid, where the richest people in the world are so much richer than they used to be five years ago,' she says. 'Pop stars won't come out and say that because they'll be absolutely shot for it, because they've all done brand deals: 'Oh, I love my Dove moisturiser.'' Thompson was one of a number of artists to pull out of Latitude and other festivals over sponsor Barclays providing financial services to defence companies supplying Israel. She says that as soon as she removed herself from the lineup, an upcoming deal with a designer perfume brand disappeared. 'They ghosted me. I lost a lot of money. But who fucking cares? I'm aware of the fact that my career is going to struggle as a result of this stuff, but I also think everyone else in music needs a kick up the hole. Where's all the fucking artists? Where's all the fucking hippies?' Of course, another reason why musicians might feel abashed about mentioning politics is fear of a social media backlash, something Thompson knows all about. Last year, an Instagram video of her performing at BBC Radio 1's Big Weekend festival attracted so much abuse – largely directed at her weight – that the BBC was forced to disable comments. She laughed it off at the time, suggesting she should be imprisoned for the crime of 'having a big fat ass', but returns to the subject on her current single, Take a Sexy Picture of Me (it has turned into that rarest of things: a song about body shaming that has provoked a TikTok dance trend, with it-girl Julia Fox and Chicken Shop Date host Amelia Dimoldenberg participating). 'Prior to moving over to the UK I would never have thought I was plus size,' she says. 'And then I started working with fashion directors in London for photoshoots and started hearing: 'Wow, you're so lucky I collect plus-size Mugler because no one else will be able to dress you.' I thought: what are you talking about? I'm a size 14! I thought everyone was this size! Why are you being so weird? But truth be told, if someone on the internet calls me a big fat ugly bitch, I'm like 'yeah, whatever', I don't fucking care. But I started realising that other people were witnessing it and other girls, young girls, were witnessing this happening to me on a fucking huge scale – what must they think of that? How is it going to make them feel, particularly if they're bigger than me?' She brings it back to commerce. 'In day-to-day real life, if you think being fat will stop people from ever wanting to have sex with you, let me tell you that is not the case in such an extreme way. I've seen the girlies out there doing unbelievably well for themselves, right? But [because] fatness is not commercially viable, it's not in the realm of commercial attractiveness.' Online, she says, the body image discourse brings out 'weak-willed, spineless people who have been brutalised by commercial viability, criticising someone for not falling within the realms of what is easily sellable'. Thompson says she is aware that the political bent of Euro-Country is a big ask of audiences in 2025, when pop seems to largely function as a means of temporary escape from a terrifying world. 'It can be read as incredibly cringe and incredibly earnest and on the nose, right? It's an embarrassing thing for me to be asking of people. Because it's not trendy to be earnest any more. I'm aware of that, and …' She laughs again. 'Actually I don't care. I don't care if I'm putting my foot in it, I don't care if I'm saying something wrong. We've all been too measured, too careful because we're being witnessed all the time. I think we need more willingness to fail. Even if it's futile, you've got to fucking try. Because it's fucking depressing otherwise.' Euro-Country is released via CMATBaby and Awal on 29 August
