Lior Narkis

Holon, the Air Force choir and a Turkish-inflected start

Lior Narkis was born in Holon on 8 November 1976. His father, David, came from a Babylonian Jewish family; his mother, Hanna, from Serbian Jewish and Greek-Tunisian Jewish lines, a mix that left him speaking Hebrew, Serbian and French. He began singing in public at sixteen and had a record out not long after.

That debut, released in 1994 and titled in Hebrew as a prayer for his life, leaned on Turkish melodic lines rather than the Greek-flavoured material that dominated Israeli Mediterranean pop at the time. Its hit compared a girl to a butterfly and it established him on the cassette-and-wedding circuit before he had done his military service.

He served in the Israeli Air Force, in its Computing Unit 180 and in the Air Force choir, then returned with two albums in quick succession — one in 1997 built around the line that she is the star, and one in 1998 named for signs. Neither broke him nationally, but both kept him working.

The gold run, then Riga

The pivot came in 1999, when he dropped the Turkish phrasing for a broader Mediterranean pop sound on an album about living for love. A year later the follow-up carried the song that made him a household name: a duet with Shlomi Shabbat on the theme that everyone has something of their own. It was named song of the year and the album went gold on 100,000 copies sold, numbers that in the Israeli market of 2000 put him among the biggest sellers in the country. The record that followed in 2001 was pitched as coming straight from the heart.

On the back of that run he was sent to the Eurovision Song Contest in Riga in 2003 with an entry built around words for love, performed partly in a handful of languages. He finished nineteenth of twenty-six finalists — a result that neither helped nor much harmed him at home, where his audience was already measured in arenas rather than televote points.

What followed was a steady album every two years: a street cat in 2005, words that were never said in 2006, a sleepwalking record in 2008, and in 2010 an album titled as an evening greeting that went gold inside a fortnight. Then came records in 2012, 2014 and, in 2016, one claiming the pair of them had made history. The venues scaled accordingly, up to the Roman amphitheatre at Caesarea and the big Tel Aviv halls. He sang at the opening ceremony of the Maccabiah Games on 6 July 2017. Even in the streaming era the singles kept topping the Israeli chart — one about being part of God in 2021, and two in 2023, one on whisky and wine, the other insisting that in the end everything will be all right.

The years he stopped working

Narkis married Sapir Vanunu in November 2009 and they had three children. The marriage ran roughly fifteen years and ended in divorce after a separation first reported in 2021, a reconciliation, and then a final break. He has since described the aftermath plainly: a long stretch of depression, during which he pulled out of the media and off the stage almost entirely.

One account he gave of that period has become the anchor of everything he has released since. He drove to a booking in Hadera crying the whole way, went on, performed as though nothing had happened, and nobody in the hall noticed.

The way back was a working relationship rather than a comeback plan. He was introduced to Ariel Eden, a producer then twenty-three years old and a wounded paratrooper who had spent two years in Gaza. Each was in the middle of his own collapse. Narkis credits Eden with getting him out of bed; Eden produced and musically directed the record that came out of it. Alongside that, during the war years he put his name to a project marrying off soldiers and released a mini-album of duets in 2024, plus a short record about sunrises the same year.

Dissonance, October 2025

The sixteenth studio album arrived on 29 October 2025 under the title Dissonance: eleven tracks running just thirty-two minutes, with arrangements noticeably thinner than the brass-and-percussion maximalism of his earlier work. Narkis called it an album of truth, of pain and of healing, and said it dealt with separation, with mental health, and with the war.

Its lead single, released the day before the album, was a duet with Sasson Shaulov on the idea of love given for nothing. A fortnight or so later he was back in the gossip pages for a dance collaboration about the footballer Eran Zahavi — a reminder that the introspective record had not replaced the commercial machine, only sat beside it.

Where he stands in October 2026

The next cycle is already moving. On 8 September 2026 he released a single declaring that he loves God — a straightforwardly devotional song whose chorus thanks God for life, and which closes on the line that if he had a fall, they will start the whole thing again from the beginning. It was billed as the first single from a new album, and in October he teased that record himself on Instagram, filming from a terrain vehicle with a caption saying he would be releasing a new album soon, God willing. That would put it roughly a year behind Dissonance.

Then his hand went into a cast. On 4 October 2026 he was treated for an injury picked up during Simchat Torah celebrations in Savyon, and posted a photograph from the treatment room, bandaged, over music about God hearing every prayer. Nothing in the diary moved.

Days before that, ticketing had opened for the one date he is currently selling: a fiftieth-birthday show billed as Celebration, at Menora Mivtachim Hall in Tel Aviv on 5 November 2026, three days before the birthday itself. His summer had already included Live Park in Rishon LeZion and, on 10 August 2026, Sultan's Pool in Jerusalem on a shared bill with the Ravivo Project.

The show as it runs now

Narkis is a hits act with a very large band, and he has not pretended otherwise. The standing format is around an hour and forty minutes, no interval, drawn across thirty years of material and padded with covers from the Mizrahi canon — a Zohar Argov standard, a Pinny Chadad composition — plus whichever single is current.

The annual Tu B'Av show, Osim Ahava, is the fixture that defines the live operation: a love-themed arena night that has run for more than a decade, moved into Menora Mivtachim Hall for consecutive years including 7 August 2025, is sold as a seated event with explicit permission to stand on the seat, and reliably sells out weeks ahead. The billing promises dozens of musicians, an undisclosed guest and the up-tempo material broken up with the slow songs.