David Balfe’s only company for a month was a herd of curious wild goats. Used to the kinetic buzz of the city, the poet-producer also known as For Those I Love was feeling somewhat out of sorts after decamping to a secluded part of Leitrim, one of Ireland’s most rural counties, to write music for his second album Carving The Stone, out now via September Recordings. “I wrote relentlessly every day and it was all garbage,” he sighs. Yet on the final day, surrounded by his half-packed gear, Balfe wrote chords that wound up at the beginning of ‘I Came Back To See The Stone Had Moved,’ the final track on the album. Feeling separated from his loved ones and “unable to hear Dublin speak to him”, he returned home to his flat, where he carefully assembled what “felt like the first album I have made for myself in about a decade”.
On its first single, ‘Of the Sorrows’, we hear the voice of an elderly Irishman reflecting on the gravity of abandoning his homeland. Choking on his own sadness, he points at the Ireland-themed posters on his bedsit wall: “I had to leave it but I want to die in it.” Like many of his generation, Balfe has had similarly conflicting thoughts about emigration. He feels rejected by Dublin, but struggles to wrap his head around leaving: whichever path he chooses feels like a painful compromise. Although taking flight feels like an appropriate response to what can be a suffocating existence, one where you can bankrupt yourself “just to stay where you belong”, how, he asks later on the song, his voice cracking with vulnerability, “could you leave without putting up a fight?”.
“I don’t know if it’s possible to stay and live a life in Dublin where there is even a modicum of comfort,” he says, further complicating the picture, “without actively making the city more difficult to live in over the long run.”
Despite the success of his self-titled first album, Balfe couldn’t face revisiting the same topics: re-traumatising himself was not an option.
“There was a time I did feel like I didn’t have anything to say as I have no interest in populating space for the sake of it. Then one day it all just started to come out.”
You can trace the genesis of this album back to an accumulating dread felt walking around his home city. Prior to his rural retreat, it slowly dawned on him that he couldn’t leave his apartment without pummelling observations, couplets, and ideas into his notes app. After realising that a second album was an artistic necessity, he patiently turned these scrawls into verses and, in his cramped home studio, produced instrumentals to make musical sense of how he was feeling.
“I was just trying to work away on myself,” he says of the album’s title, a reference to a turn of phrase he often used when asked how the album was going. “There were the practicalities of the long recovery from the years that preceded the inspiration for the first album. I felt like I was just trying to work away on myself while having an idea of what I was trying to uncover.”
On his ambitious, gut-wrenching and frankly astonishing second album, Balfe retains a focus on life in working-class communities and familial love, but zooms out to the bigger picture. Over soaring strings, sharp guitar lines, the loudest drums he’s ever made, and pretty clubland-synth swells, Balfe much more directly addresses how Irish capitalism ravages working-class communities. Whether he’s declaring, imploring, questioning, crying, shouting, or borderline rapping, Balfe is never more than a sentence away from venting his frustrations at the miseries of renting, measly paychecks, double-jobbing and debt: “This was partly my emotional response to what feels like a ‘cultural death,’ a strangling of a city and a generation.”
Hushed but vicious, his voice sounds clearer—and angrier—than ever; the distinct voice of a street philosopher, a radical polemicist, and a confessional poet rolled into one hyperliterate ex-raver. Dublin is, as one lyric goes, ‘in bed with techno-feudalism,’ a theory which argues that we have undergone a transition to a post-capitalist world in which we are all digital serfs, enslaved by our new feudal overlords in Silicon Valley. On ‘Mirror’, he describes almost being stabbed as a crime of lesser proportions than everyday class war: “See I’ve been knifed alive by mine, but wined and dined by those on high became the bigger crime to me, if I’m going to bleed then make me bleed with a blade I can see”.
On ‘No Scheme’, Balfe contrasts the aliveness, hedonism and self-destructiveness of his teenage years to the numbness of adult working life. “We’ve all got real jobs and we’re bored’. Few things expose the harsh ticking of time more than monotonous office jobs. He even calls, tongue in cheek, for the seizure of the “means of chronic boredom from the bourgeoisie”.
Carving the Stone is a bold reckoning with what it feels like to be alive today in contemporary Dublin, as well as a depiction of Balfe’s own quest to find stability in a city riven with malice. He finds pockets of peace and truth between Marxist musings and diaristic writing on the meaning of art; between vignettes that capture the indignities of working-class life and bright memories of teenage abandon. For Balfe, great art, and meaning, can only be found in the grey areas of life, somewhere between hopefulness and despair.
For Those I Love Live Dates
Septermber
23 – The Fleece, Bristol
25 – Islington Assembly Hall, London
28 – Gorilla, Manchester
29 – Room 2, Glasgow
October
1 – Limelight 2, Belfast
2 – Cyprus Ave, Cork
3 – Mike The Pies, Listowel
5 – Black Box, Galway
6 – 3Olympia Theatre, Dublin
For more information on For Those I Love please check their instagram and website.