The emblem of modern Ireland? Not fiddles and Guinness but a soulless shopping plaza | Emer McHugh

The singer CMAT dances around a retail centre in a video for her new album. It is the elegy those of us who grew up in the post-Celtic tiger recession have been craving

You wouldn't know it to look at the tourist board ads, but the emblem of modern Ireland is probably a shopping centre. And now that emblem has found its bard, in the form of Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, the Irish pop star and songwriter better known as CMAT. She is a woman wielding a creative energy that is completely her own, but which is also profoundly shaped by her experiences coming of age in a post-Celtic tiger, recession-era Ireland. This has never been clearer than on her new single, Euro-Country, from the forthcoming album of the same name - a project that reminds us that pop culture has the power to illuminate political and social realities that are otherwise being ignored. It is the elegy that we, Ireland's post-recession generation, needed - and it references at least two shopping centres.

The Euro-Country album artwork is a send-up of Jean-Leon Gerome's painting Truth Coming Out of Her Well, with CMAT emerging from the fountain in Blanchardstown shopping centre, beside a giant euro coin. In an interview with the Guardian before her spectacular Glastonbury performance in June, Thompson observed that while Ireland is a little more fetishised and trendy than it's ever been", it's also 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."