Ciaran Lavery shares new track ‘Ctrl Alt Del’ (feat. Liz Lawrence) today, announces new album, out 15th Nov

August 30, 2024 BY Emma Orland

Acclaimed Northern Irish singer-songwriter Ciaran Lavery has today announced his ambitious new album Light Entertainment, out 15th November through Nettwerk.

Light Entertainment, Lavery’s fifth album overall, is his most multi-layered and intriguing to date. With the upcoming record, he invites listeners into a world that is strange and fraught… 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.

Out digitally tomorrow, listen to the rousing new single ‘Ctrl Alt Del’ here and below now, which features the enigmatic Liz Lawrence

“This is a song of desperation”, Lavery says. “There is a real self-awareness of how history is repeating itself, and how those responsible for the greater decisions are sending the common people into a whirlpool. It is also a song that deals with the self-awareness that self-awareness is not enough, and how heady it can be to carry this around without any ability to change things. It is an acknowledgement that those above us would rather they could reset us, or we reset ourselves, to make all of this less painful, hence ‘Ctrl, Alt, Del.’”

Watch & Share: Ciaran Lavery & Liz Lawrence – Ctrl Alt Del (Official Lyric Video)

Ctrl Alt Del’ follows on from previous singles ’Honeybun’, ‘The World Will Put Its Arms Around You’ and ‘Oh My God (No, Your God) – feat. Morgana’.

Ciaran Lavery is a Belfast-based, award-winning, multi-nominated singer-songwriter and musician who has released four acclaimed albums with well over 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 for Let Bad In. He’s been the subject of praise from the BBCThe TelegraphThe IndependentCLASH, Hot Press, and more over the years.

Lavery wrote all 11-tracks on Light Entertainment in just over two weeks, recording it himself with friends Danny Ball and Dan Byrne-McCullough. As with his previous releases, there’s an undercurrent of the artist’s sly wit that – regardless of this being his self-proclaimed “apocalypse album” – keeps it from becoming bogged down in its own gloom. Few musicians are quite as self-aware as Lavery: with fellow Belfast native Joshua Burnside, he assesses his attitude towards the mainstream music industry and questions whether he’ll ever find his place in “an often brutal and callous world” on the track ‘We’re Looking For a Hit’. Lavery also dives into questions of faith, history and divisions in songs such as ‘Oh My God (No, Your God)’, while ‘Everything Considered’ reflects on those repeat behaviours we turn to as a coping mechanism to numb our feelings of helplessness.

The album ends with the anthemic ‘The World Will Put Its Arms Around You’, sending the listener spiralling back up towards the surface, propelled by skittering percussion and buoyant piano notes. “It exists as the hopeful hopelessness in a sea of paranoia, finger-pointing, anger and despair that has gone before,” Lavery says. Somehow, he manages to leave us 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.

Light Entertainment will be accompanied by an astonishing short film – directed by Shaun Doogan and Ciarán McCann, which represents (in a surreal fashion) what Lavery encapsulates on the album: how a constant stream of information (and misinformation), news, social media, images, video and entertainment leave us in a perpetually overwhelmed state. Watch the trailer here and below:

Watch & Share: Ciaran Lavery – Light Entertainment (Trailer)

To listen to Light Entertainment in full and any other promo requests, or enquiries, please contact Ken @ Nettwerk.

Catch Ciaran Lavery live in November, including unique concept show at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, melding music and musical theatre together.

Live Dates:

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

20th Nov – London, UK @ The Green Room

22nd Nov – Amsterdam, NL @ Torpedo Theatre

Light Entertainment – tracklisting:

1. Hearse

2. Oh My God (No, Your God) (feat. Morgana)

3. Ted Bundy Tapes

4. Everything Considered

5.  We’re Looking For A Hit (feat. Joshua Burnside)

6. Ctrl Alt Del (feat. Liz Lawrence)

7. Heart Malaise

8. Designed For Disaster

9. Honeybun

10. Death By Abeyance

11. The World Will Put Its Arms Around You