CMAT Delivers Unbridled Joy at Triumphant Basement East Show

The last time Irish pop-country dynamo CMAT made her way through Nashville was in 2022, when she played a solo show at the OG Basement. A YouTube video from that tour stop, recorded just a few weeks after the singer released her debut studio album If My Wife New I’d Be Dead, shows her sitting alone onstage on a stool with a keyboard balanced on her lap singing a song called “Nashville,” which was written before she’d even visited Music City. Since then, CMAT has headlined multiple music festivals, including the 2025 Glastonbury Festival, where she drew a crowd of thousands. She also released her stellar album Euro-Country, featuring the breakout hit “Take a Sexy Picture of Me,” which has delightfully been dubbed the “Woke Macarana” by some. 

So things looked a bit different for CMAT’s sold-out show at The Basement East on Sunday, the last stop on her U.S. tour. The audience showed up early for a first-rate set from Austin, Texas, indie band Tele Novella and was already buzzing with energy by the time CMAT took the stage. From the opening notes of “Janis Joplining,” which the singer delivered from the back of the venue before sashaying her way through the crowd to the stage, it was clear: Whether it’s a sold-out show or a pop-up for a dozen people at a Buc-ee’s, CMAT is going to give you absolutely everything she has. (Note: To my knowledge, CMAT has never actually performed at a Buc-ee’s, but that would be iconic.) 

I’ve never seen anyone command a stage with more ease than the Dunboyne, Ireland-raised artist. During “Jamie Oliver Petrol Station,” a cheeky faux diss track about the celebrity chef, she strutted across the stage in a frenzy as if giving a sermon.

“This is making no fucking sense to the average listener,” she shouted before launching into the rollicking, ABBA-inspired “I Don’t Really Care for You.” Midway through, she stopped to vamp for the audience before resuming the song, doing high kicks and choreo with her band, The Very Sexy CMAT Band. At one point she stopped the show to let a fan show off their outfit. “Sometimes you just have to put a bitch onstage,” she quipped.

“We’re just all little girls from Ireland — we’ve been roaming around in our little bus ... and the place seems to be falling down around us,” the artist born Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson told the crowd, addressing the current state of our nation. “But never you mind, because tonight we’re just going to have a very, very sexy show — a sexy show for all the gays, because this town has some of the finest caliber of LGBTQIA+ that I’ve ever come across in my life.” 

Before performing “Take a Sexy Picture of Me,” the singer reflected on how the song was inspired by comments on social media about her body — something she saw an influx of after she began performing at festivals. 

“People would film us on their mobile telephones, and they would post the videos of us on the internet, and very regularly the comment section of those videos would fill with very nasty comments about my physical appearance,” she said, the audience responding with boos for the misogynistic keyboard warriors. “We should not do that because it’s not nice, but in the case of my physical appearance, it seems a little factually incorrect because I am, in fact, very sexy.”

One of the highlights of the night: CMAT brought Nashville songwriter Tori Tullier onstage to help her sing “Iceberg,” a “song for Titanic-loving bisexuals everywhere,” which the pair co-wrote with another Nashville artist, Cameron Neal. 

After a rousing one-two punch of “Where Are Your Kids Tonight?” and “Running/Planning,” the band left the stage and returned a few minutes later for an encore. CMAT introduced the anthemic “Euro-Country,” a song about how much she loves her home country of Ireland, with a call to reject racism and fascism. 

“It feels really important to say that right now, because at the moment [Ireland is] in the process of being taken over by the far right, who are every week staging racist, anti-immigration protests and becoming more and more violent against minorities in Dublin and Belfast in particular,” she said. “I feel like it’s more important now than ever to reclaim the narrative from those people [and] to leave absolutely no room for them, because Ireland is for everybody, and I feel that the same logic could be applied here.”

Though she rarely plays it on tour, in a triumphant moment, CMAT launched into her song “Nashville” after sharing what it means to her to perform the tune in its namesake city.

“This song is very, very special to me, and I’m very grateful to be able to play it here,” she said. 

Then, decreed by the law of CMAT, the singer led the crowd in a dance she called the “Dunboyne County Meath Two-Step” during “I Wanna Be a Cowboy Baby.” The stirring Western-inspired tune sounds like a long-lost Paula Cole song that would’ve been performed at Lilith Fair. The performance featured an assist from opening act Tele Novella.

Before closing out the set with the torchy “Stay for Something,” CMAT noted her reluctance to end the night, and the audience clearly felt the same. 

“I would love to play everything, but we would be here for, I believe, like, three hours,” she said. “Maybe one day I’ll Bruce Springsteen the shit out of it.”

After Sunday's show, it’s easy to believe that day will soon come.