For Those I Love, the brainchild of Dublin producer, visual artist and songwriter David Balfe, releases his critically-acclaimed second album Carving The Stone today on September Recordings. LISTEN HERE.

A landmark for modern Irish music, the record has seen significant support across the campaign from the likes of DAZED, The Guardian, The FADER, NME, Stereogum, The Independent, Brooklyn Vegan, The Irish Times, Wonderland, Resident Advisor, Mixmag, The Line Of Best Fit, CLASH and more. The album sees his voice sounding 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.

It follows Balfe’s self-titled 2021 debut album which also landed to significant public and critical acclaim internationally. The record was 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‘ was immortalised in an Overmono remix that is a euphoric highlight of their live sets to this day, one that he performed as a special guest with them at his first Glastonbury this year.

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.”

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.