Hardware: new Lenovo laptop and the audio isn't working.

Greetings. Are you referring to the built-in speakers on the laptop? There are quite a lot of ways to look into that on a Windows PC. Microsoft has a very extensive sound troubleshooting guide found here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/fix-sound-problems-in-windows-10 The steps would be nearly identical regardless of Windows 10 or 11, so I would suggest trying the options here.