Carving The Stone is the second album from Dublin producer, visual artist and songwriter David Balfe following on from recent single ‘Of The Sorrows’.
Balfe is bringing For Those I Love on tour around Ireland for the first time and along with UK dates.
The video for new song ‘No Scheme’ was performed live with Balfe jogging while he says his words in the song addressing the mundane nature of office job living, and “contrasts the aliveness, hedonism and self-destructiveness of his teenage years to the numbness of adult working life.”
“‘No Scheme’ is the spiritual successor to ‘Top Scheme’, the only track on the new album with a direct link to the old. Anchored by the same chaos as ‘Top Scheme’, ‘No Scheme’ trades some of its anger for despondency, its rage for reflection, while never fully leaving that original fire behind. Like much of the album it comes from, whenever it points the finger outwardly, it points it back inwardly too. Hypocrisy, complacency, and culpability are all present, but so too is a search for justice or meaning in an increasingly confusing time. A great deal has changed since I wrote it, but I feel as committed as ever to sharing it with you all.”
David Balfe.
For Those I Love Tour Dates
30 August – Electric Picnic Festival, Stradbally
Tuesday 23rd September – The Fleece, Bristol
Thursday 25th September – Islington Assembly Hall, London
Sunday 28th September – Gorilla, Manchester
Monday 29th September – Room 2, Glasgow
1 October – Limelight 2, Belfast
2 October – Cyprus Ave, Cork
3 October – Mike The Pies, Listowel
5 October – Black Box, Galway
6 October – Olympia Theatre, Dublin
Tickets for the tour will go on general sale on Friday 4th July at 10am. Pre-sale access will be available from Tuesday 2nd July at 10am. You can access the tour pre-sale and pre-order the new album from the official store here.
For Those I Love – Carving The Stone tracklist
- Carving The Stone
- No Quiet
- No Scheme
- The Ox / The Afters
- Civic
- Mirror
- This Is Not The Place I Belong
- Of The Sorrows
- I Came Back To See The Stone Had Moved
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. You can pre-order the new album and access tour pre-sale from the official store here.
More on Carving The Stone
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.
Niall Byrne is the founder of the most-influential Irish music site Nialler9, where he has been writing about music since 2005 . He is the co-host of the Nialler9 Podcast and has written for the Irish Times, Irish Independent, Cara Magazine, Sunday Times, Totally Dublin, Red Bull and more. Niall is a DJ, founder of Lumo Club, club promoter, event curator and producer of gigs, listening parties & events in Dublin.
