For Those I Love, the brainchild of Dublin producer, visual artist and songwriter David Balfe, today announce that their second album, Carving The Stone, is set for release on August 8th via September Recordings. Following his acclaimed return last month with ‘Of The Sorrows‘, his first new material since 2021, he also shares a second single from the record, a sequel of sorts to a highlight from the debut, in the form of ‘No Scheme’. LISTEN TO ‘NO SCHEME’ HERE + WATCH LIVE PERFORMANCE VIDEO HERE + PRE-ORDER LP HERE.

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.’

A “spiritual successor” to ‘Top Scheme‘ (which explored the intoxicating thrill of violence), it faces head on the mundanity of your early thirties when you’ve sold your soul. He is torn between a desire for stability and an undeniable lust for danger. But here, as elsewhere on the record, Balfe embraces the hypocrises of modern life, even calling himself a ‘class traitor’. We are all compromised, especially if we don’t fight back like the ‘Ma’s on the frontlines of the boycotts,’ but we can make some kind of peace in moral ambiguity.

In 2021, Balfe released his self-titled debut album to significant public and critical acclaim internationally. On its release, the record sat at #1 release of 2021 on the review aggregator Album Of The Year and as the 3rd Best Album Of 2021 on Metacritic. The record was also celebrated as BBC 6 Music’s Album Of The Day, went on to win Ireland’s prestigious Choice Music Prize in 2022 and its emotive lead single ‘I Have A Love‘ has been immortalised in an Overmono remix that is a euphoric highlight of their live sets to this day.

If he were to commit to a follow-up, 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,” Balfe says. “Then one day it all just started to come out.” After a prolific period where he couldn’t leave his Dublin apartment without pummelling observations, couplets, and ideas into his notes app he realised that a second album had become 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.

On the ambitious Carving The Stone, 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. Where his debut focused on the death of his best friend, these tracks – and their ghostly instrumentals – meditate on a much wider demise. 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 pay checks, 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.”

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. Carving The Stone will be released on CD, standard black LP, an Irish exclusive coloured LP, an indie store only exclusive coloured LP and a highly limited Dinked exclusive edition LP.