For Those I Love, the brainchild of Dublin producer, visual artist and songwriter David Balfe, last month announced that a much-anticipated second album, Carving The Stone, is set for release on August 8th via September Recordings. Following his acclaimed return with ‘Of The Sorrows‘ and its follow-up single ‘No Scheme‘, and a visceral first performance at Glastonbury, as both solo artist and as a special guest with Overmono, today Balfe shares a hard-hitting third track from the new record in ‘Mirror’. LISTEN HERE + WATCH HERE + PRE-ORDER LP HERE.

Premiered by Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1, alongside an interview and David covering the New Music Daily playlist, and paired to a striking video directed by Niall Trask (Jamie T, Alabaster DePlume, Fat White Family) the latest single 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 hyper-literate ex-raver. Dublin, is ‘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.

His most propulsive song to date, driven ever-forward by thumping drums, Balfe 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.” It’s further proof, if proof were needed, that Carving The Stone is set to be a landmark piece of art for 2025 on its release next month.

WATCH: Mirror (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.

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.