Ciaran Lavery’s stunning new album Light Entertainment out today, shares video w/ Joshua Burnside

Acclaimed Northern Irish singer-songwriter Ciaran Lavery shares his stunning new album Light Entertainment, out today on Nettwerk – LISTEN HERE.

Accompanying the release is the searing and sardonic new single, ‘We’re Looking For A Hit’, featuring vocals from fellow Belfast-based singer-songwriter Joshua Burnside. Watch the official music visualiser here and below.

“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.”

“We’re Looking for a Hit Feat. Joshua Burnside” (Official Music Visualiser)

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.

Listen to Light Entertainment

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.

“Light” Entertainment (Short Film)

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.

Catch Ciaran Lavery live, including a headline show in London next week.