Releases ‘We’re Looking For A Hit’ feat. Joshua Burnside

from his new album Light Entertainment out this Fri. 15 Nov

Plays The Lyric Theatre, Belfast on Thursday 14th Nov.

Acclaimed Northern Irish singer-songwriter Ciaran Lavery shares his searing and sardonic new single, ‘We’re Looking For A Hit’ (download WAV) featuring vocals from fellow Belfast-based singer-songwriter Joshua Burnside. Taken from his stunning new album Light Entertainment, out this Friday 15 Nov.

“The track deals with my personal history and feelings about working within the music industry,” Lavery says. “Through all of the trials, tribulations, successes and setbacks, it ultimately comes down to one thing “we’re looking for a hit”. It also looks at issues of self-worth and trying to find ones place in an often brutal and callous world.”

Light Entertainment is Lavery’s fifth studio album, and first since 2020’s lauded Plz Stay, bb, it is his most multi-layered, intriguing record yet. Featuring his trademark wit, he invites listeners into a world that is strange and fraught, and one not for the faint of heart. As Lavery explains, it is an “apocalypse record”, into which he has poured all of the paranoia, deceit, conflict and desperation that crashes like a tidal wave across our lives. The album has already received praise from BBC Radio, The Irish Sunday Times, Hot Press, The Thin Air and more. 

Light Entertainment has also been made into an astonishing short film – directed by Shaun Doogan and Ciarán McCann at Re-Act Productions, which follows Lavery through a sequence of increasingly surreal scenarios inspired by classic film noir and Noughties indie movies, it even features Irish national treasure Daniel O’Donnell, playing a phantasmagorical version of himself. The film represents what Lavery encapsulates on the album: how a constant deluge of information (and misinformation), news, social media, images, video and entertainment leaves us in a perpetually overwhelmed state. 

Across the 11 tracks on Light Entertainment, recorded with friends Danny Ball and Dan B-M, Lavery captures a distinct and authentic sly wit that subverts the self-declared “apocalypse album” tag, keeping it from becoming bogged down in its own gloom. Lavery addresses questions of faith, history and divisions in album singles such as ‘Oh My God (No, Your God) (featuring Morgana)’, while ‘Everything Considered’ reflects on the repeat behaviours we turn to as a coping mechanism to numb our feelings of helplessness. 

The album closes with the anthemic ‘The World Will Put Its Arms Around You’, propelling the listener back to the surface, leaving with a message of defiance and hope.  No matter how the world you see around you differs from the one you dreamt of. “Hope”, he says, “is just about the only thing we have that persists.”

Ciaran Lavery is an award-winning, singer-songwriter and musician who has released multiple acclaimed albums and amassed more than 150 million streams to date. Lavery’s music has been nominated four times at the NI Music Prize, winning album of the year in 2016. He’s been the subject of praise from the BBC, The Telegraph, The Independent, CLASH, Hot Press, and more over the years.

Live Dates:

14th Nov – Belfast, UK @ The Lyric Theatre [tickets]

20th Nov – London, UK @ The Green Room [tickets]

22nd Nov – Amsterdam, NL @ Torpedo Theatre [tickets]