For Those I Love, the brainchild of Dublin producer, visual artist and songwriter David Balfe, returns today with a new single, ‘Of The Sorrows’. LISTEN HERE + WATCH HERE.

Paired to a self-directed video, Balfe had the following to say about FTIL’s much-anticipated new material: “When I wrote “Of The Sorrows”, it felt like I was bargaining with myself. It was one of the first songs I’d written to myself, for myself, while still trying to embody the feelings and thoughts of my closest peers. At its heart, “Of The Sorrows” is about a city rapidly boxing you out, and the choices you make in order to stay.

“I started to shoot the video for “Of The Sorrows” on Christmas Day. I traded a couple hundred hours, a broken hard drive (had to start again), my sense of patience, and a broken leg I got on the last day of filming. But I could make peace with that deal. It felt good to give so much life to a project about a dying city.”

WATCH: ‘Of The Sorrows’ (Official Video)

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. In Australia, the album was supported across Double J with a Feature Album spotlight, and fbi.radio as their Album of the Week upon release.

While the cathartic lyrical content was key to the record’s message, the music itself has also been singled out for repeated praise, skipping as it did between the off-kilter, ethereal and the celebratory. ‘Of The Sorrows’ carries similar gravitas, featuring the considered, direct wordplay that has made Balfe’s name already. 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.” Such thoughtful, nuanced writing and thinking characterised Balfe’s debut for September Recordings, a soul-bearing set of songs about his love for his friends already considered by many to be a modern day Irish classic.

After the significant impact of that record, why the prolonged time between its release and today’s new single? “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.” You can trace the genesis for ‘Of The Sorrows’ back not to one single moment but to the accumulating dread felt walking around his home city of Dublin. It slowly dawned on him that he couldn’t leave his apartment without pummelling observations, couplets, and ideas into his notes app.

If he were to commit to a follow-up, Balfe couldn’t face revisiting the same topics: re-traumatising himself was not an option. 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. Further new material will follow from For Those I Love in 2025.