CMAT hides real ache inside a camp Western fantasy on “I Wanna Be a Cowboy, Baby!”

Everything that makes CMAT CMAT is already here in miniature. “I Wanna Be a Cowboy, Baby!” builds a ridiculous, technicolour country-pop fantasy — a Dublin woman who’d rather be a cowboy than deal with her actual life — and then quietly lets you notice it’s a song about urban loneliness and not feeling at home anywhere. The camp is just the delivery system for the ache.

The arrangement leans all the way into the joke: Nashville pastiche by way of Eurovision, a chorus you can practically see spelled out in neon. It’s modern Irish indie that wears its influences and its irony loudly, refusing to be tasteful when it could be enormous instead. Restraint is not the assignment.

It works because of how hard CMAT commits. Her delivery is huge, knowing, almost vaudevillian — she throws herself into the bit so completely that it loops right back around to sincerity. You laugh, and then you realise you believe her.

And the lyric earns that double-take. The cowboy fantasy is really a self-diagnosis: the wanting-to-be-anywhere-else is the whole point, and the Western dress-up is just the most fun way she can find to say she’s unhappy. Escapism as confession is a neat trick, and she pulls it off without ever dropping the smile.

The kitsch is a high-wire act, though, and it won’t catch everyone. For some listeners the irony works as armour, keeping the real feeling just out of reach, and the song can tip toward overstuffed — more personality than discipline, more gags than the frame can quite hold. It’s a debut-single swing, with all the slight excess that implies.

Final take: “I Wanna Be a Cowboy, Baby!” is a camp, hook-stuffed country-pop calling card that smuggles genuine loneliness in under the rhinestones — CMAT announcing both a persona and the wound that powers it. Few writers make this much fun out of being this sad.