Ciaran Lavery launches new album

The Aghagallon man will be returning home for the live date after performing at the highly acclaimed South by SouthWest in Austin Texas.

His Belfast show will be followed by the launch of Ciaran’s second album, ‘Let Bad In’, on May 27.

Ciaran blends Americana and hip-hop influences in a grainy voice with a deep soul impulse over processed beats and sumptuous strings.

“Nobody wants to be pigeonholed,” he said. “It’s therapeutic to move into some weird, in-between genres. I’d rather not be pinned down. I always use Tom Waits as an example.

“The same with Beck. Nobody says, ‘Oh, Beck moves around too much. I don’t get it’. It’s a different sound all the time. He goes from one extreme to the other and it works.”

‘Let Bad In’ is essentially an album based on the naivety of childhood and the loss of that innocence with age. It all started as his uncle handed him an old VHS tape with home video footage of a family trip when he was 7, and that’s how the album started taking shape.

“I was watching myself being so carefree, just doing things because I felt like it. I didn’t react to anything, I just did,” explained Ciaran.

“It made me think about how much I can’t relate to that person anymore, as an older version of myself – I’m scarred by experience and previous life choices that have altered all my decisions for better or worse. No matter how much I try, I will never be that 7-year-old version of myself, I will never have that wide eyed innocence.

“There are elements of both my past and present in there. I think everyone envies the child they were, for the fearlessness that they once had and can never really recapture. I have written ten songs based all around that nostalgic innocence of youth and now, older, how I look at things, what things I face in the future. It’s a very personal album.”