CMAT credits Beyoncé for her Mercury Prize nomination
CMAT has praised Beyoncé for her work within the country genre and credited the global superstar for helping her land the nomination for her 2025 album Euro-Country.
CMAT, who is the favourite to win the prestigious award at the award ceremony in Newcastle on October 16th, believes that Beyoncé’s 2024 country record, Cowboy Carter, has changed perceptions around the often-overlooked country genre.
Discussing the record, CMAT told Daily Star’s Wired column, “Beyoncé winning a Grammy for it is particularly interesting, and I think it is a really good sign of how she’s opening it up to so many other people, because this is a woman who got it really badly in the neck from the country music establishment in 2016 when she brought the Dixie Chicks – or the Chicks out – at the Country Music Awards and people were like fuming, fuming at this woman for taking ownership of it.”
She continued, “It’s funny because she comes from Texas, which they say is where country music comes from. So I was like, ‘What are you gonna do?’ What I’ve dealt with in my career so far is going to America and people not accepting that what I make is country music and saying what I make is not country music, because country music is a genre that is so tied into people’s identities in the south… being co-opted by white Christian conservatives.”
Expanding on the key barrier she has faced in her career, she added, “And so they tied into their identity and if anyone wants to come in and use it for self-expression, they think it’s literally not allowed. This is a conversation that’s coming up a lot nowadays because country music is having this revival and we had the Beyoncé album where people were like, ‘That’s not country music. She’s just making it modern by introducing new stuff to it.'”
On the contrary, CMAT believes that Beyoncé’s very album has pushed country music into the mainstream, setting off the chain of events that landed CMAT the Mercury Prize nomination. CMAT is nominated alongside Emma-Jean Thackray, FKA Twigs, Fontaines DC, Jacob Alon, Joe Webb, Martin Carthy, Pa Salieu, PinkPantheress, Pulp, Sam Fender, and Wolf Alice.
Recently, CMAT had to postpone her upcoming tour due to an urgent medical issue. An infected wisdom tooth has rendered her unable to “even open my mouth wide enough to laugh, let alone sing”.
In a glowing four-and-a-half-star review of her 2025 album, Far Out observed, “This is an album that has everything. It is so obvious that CMAT put everything into it, dealing with such a vast array of thoughts, feelings and topics, backed by a broad musical landscape from Stevie Nicks-style rock to pure country sorrow. Everything is all out, and CMAT has gone all in. The result? An opus. An opus of her talent, her wit and her vital voice on vital topics of real-world happenings and inner world emotions.”
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