Ciaran Lavery – set to release single ‘We’re Looking For A Hit’ feat. Joshua Burnside / along with new album ”Light Entertainment”

Acclaimed Northern Irish singer-songwriter Ciaran Lavery shares his searing and sardonic new single, ‘We’re Looking For A Hit’ 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 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.”

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

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]