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 sophomore album. “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 curtain-closer to his exhilaratingly existential second record, Carving the Stone. Feeling separated from his loved ones and “unable to hear Dublin speak to him”, he returned home to his flat, where, over several years, 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.”
Such thoughtful, nuanced writing and thinking characterised Balfe’s self-titled debut, a soul-bearing set of songs about his love for his friends that earned the north Dublin native rave reviews. Accolades such as the Choice Music Prize and a raft of five-star reviews (NME, The Independent, The Irish Times), together with an album of the year nod (Rolling Stone UK), recognised his rare musical and literary gifts. On the Irish album charts, it took Justin Bieber to pip him to number one.
At its core this elegiac album retold the story of Balfe's unbreakable bond with the late Paul Curran, his beloved best friend and lifelong music collaborator. It was a self-produced spoken-word masterpiece centred on lovingly curated samples and ravey electronica, a spiritual mix of burial rites, nostalgic memories, intimate voice recordings, and prosaic details of a life shared with friends. No wonder the dance music giants Overmono turned to ‘I Have a Love’, the album’s emotional centrepiece, for a blistering reworking for their first commercial mix. Despite the album’s success, 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,” he says. “Then one day it all just started to come out."
You can trace the genesis of this album back not to one single moment but to the 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 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. 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 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’ (his most propulsive song to date, driven by thumping drums), 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’.
The album starts with Balfe experiencing “a frenzied, isolated panic”. As synths twinkle, he whispers about the onset of tinnitus, a condition which led him to think about his own permanence. (‘Forced awake at night to mourn this loss of time’). From the first verse to the last, the album grapples with the moment when the freedom of youth dies and a more permanent angst sets in—the moment when the insipidness of contemporary life becomes obvious and, for some people, too much to bear.
Fearful of “the cruelty of time,” Balfe considers on this album the beauty of bygone days. On ‘Civic’, he remembers feeling ‘alive with the lyrics’ in ‘a burnt out Civic’; a moment when ‘songs filled every day’. Although disturbed by the loss of something pure to the passage of time, Balfe feels that time itself slows down when he’s reaching into his soul to create art. “In the process of doing,” he explains, “I feel connected with myself and the process of living.”
Carving the Stone produces his most vivid storytelling yet: a vicious beating of a man outside a creche, a knife attack near a train station, a woman whose family have all disappeared struggling to survive. Through Balfe’s empathetic eyes, these characters are brought alive with razor-sharp narrative detail; the man who suffered a beating has two missed calls from his mother, while the woman stubbornly holds out hope that her troubled brother will, despite his foibles, save her from her own torments.
He is unafraid to lapse into the voices of others, flitting between the chillingly real and poetic abstraction. One standout character is the Ox, an amalgamation of different personalities from Balfe’s life. He is 52-year old former dock worker and ex-boxer, an alcoholic gallivanter who, in some of Balfe’s most evocative, novelistic writing yet, has an ‘Alex Higgins sway’ and ‘shadow boxed the air as he went’.
“My challenge,” he explains, “is to try in a couplet—in a moment—to talk not just about the horror of the moment, but to shift the lens and humanise the character.”
Last time around, he excavated what he called archival samples, often WhatsApp voice recordings and videos featuring his friends. On most songs here, Balfe incorporates clips pilfered from public or historic archives. Among them are a moving sample of the traditional Irish singer Neilí Ní Dhomhnaill; a snippet from a documentary of a teenager hailing the working-class power of early punk in Belfast during the early Troubles; and an early moment of Irish YouTube virality that captures the moment a teenage boy jumps into the River Liffey in Dublin. The latter gets to the heart of Balfe’s album, a struggle with the seeming expiration of “time and a feeling of freedom, recklessness and a lack of fear of consequence.”
On ‘No Scheme’, he 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.
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.
