Featuring recent singles ‘No Scheme’ and ‘Of The Sorrows’, For Those I Love’s second album Carving The Stone is released on August 8th.
‘Mirror’ is a darker, harder tune from For Those I Love that brings a busier textured production to proceedings with a big kick drum, and lyrics that speak to techno-feudalism (Techno-feudalism is the idea that big tech are the modern world’s feudal landlords), that end up rallying against with Balfe shouting “Cunts” as he takes the listener on a trip through the overground underbelly of life in Dublin referencing Blackshirt fascists, and the hate-filled social media nationalists.
Balfe references breaking his legs on the video shoot for the album’s first single ‘Of The Sorrows’ saying “I feel these legs are tryna break me as the dark air takes me,” before an encounter with a blade-wielding balaclava “man with life and death in his veins”
Paddy Pintman
Scabby joints man
Happy slapping, stabbing, always bragging, what’s the point
We shoot pool in the same club, walk to work on the same street,
Chat shit in the same pub, and sink pints in the same seat.
The video for ‘Mirrors’ was directed by Niall Trask (Jamie T, Alabaster DePlume, Fat White Family) .
Zane Lowe will interview Dave Balfe on Apple Music 1 on his show on Friday.
For Those I Love – Mirrors Lyrics
The only ones I’ve ever loved
All live within this neighbourhood
I don’t think I’ll ever leave.
The only ones I’ve ever loved
All live within this neighbourhood
Sometimes I watch them fight to breathe.
The only ones I’ve ever loved
All live within this neighbourhood
Sometimes they press the steel to me.
The only ones I’ve ever loved
All live within this neighbourhood
They feel so far away from me.
Going home and hoping, sleep and heat, and peace, and hiding out
Limping off the train, the rain will follow me, it’s beating down
First day off the sticks, the bricks and accident broke me
Eighteen weeks of their assists so now I’m solo and slowly.
Holy Night in sight, a fight, and fire, and fog in the field
Pass by a guy that’s high and tryna find a light in his jeans
Push round the corner stair, to moonlight air and the shadow safety
I feel these legs are tryna break me as the dark air takes me.
The pounding sound of ground around the corner is closing
The chosen path I’m walking might just be the end of my road and
Turn my head and catch the silver shining blade in his hand
I both stayed and I ran, no luck, my legs in the sand
It’s some ballyed up man with life and death in his veins
And then he calls out my name, double barrel, his saying
It goes full name, whole name, surname and all
I swear the cold of the bold steel
Was screaming the call.
Paddy Pintman
Scabby joints man
Happy slapping, stabbing, always bragging, what’s the point man
I know them all, I’ve seen them fall, I hear your call man
I know your fear and fury, and you’re lacking hope and light, man.
Paddy Pintman
Scabby joints man
Happy slapping, stabbing, always bragging, what’s the point
We shoot pool in the same club, walk to work on the same street,
Chat shit in the same pub, and sink pints in the same seat.
This place is alive with all the lives before the tragedy
They still speak to me casually, but I’ll never share it
I’m cold but I care, it’s old but I’ll bear it
Some pain never fades it just appears is new ways.
This place is alive with with the lives before the tragedy
They still speak to me casually, and I pretend I don’t hear it
I’m cold but I care, I’m told I have to spare it
The drone of constant scroll is too much to bear
And it’s
Pigeons dead at my feet, pigeons dead at my feet
Bad decisions lead to a belief that creeps it’s way into your soul
Like some cold black hole that sweeps away every defeat that lingered on ya
This is not the place that I belong, not the place that I grew up on
Blackshirt cunts squeezing the life and lungs out of the middle grounds
In the shadow of borrowed time on the trash heap of authority
Priority boarding to anywhere the fuck else
Shelf yourself for a moment pay the extra score for fuck all more
This kip is a bubbling mess
Depressed and depleted, and half sedated
How many of us are miseducated?
Inflated by a hate filled rhetoric
With ideologues influencing the city’s sprogs like gods
Automating ourselves out of jobs and I’m guilty, born filthy
Seems like no love can fill me, no other place can thrill me
Still I choose to plant roots in this lose/lose
Repeat the picture, an ounce for mixture, denounce the crowd and bleed for scripture
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.
Reprobate, ethnostate, modern nationalist cunts
They manipulate young workers and then neglect them when done
The modern state will strip a man down until he’s naked and scared
And these cnting blackshirts will give him a face to lace with his fears. Cunts, cnts, cnts, cnts, cnts, cnts, cnts, cnts, cnts, cnts, cnts, cnts
These bitter fuckers will tell a man that to hate is to love
And hang them out to dry as soon as they’re done.
Balfe is bringing For Those I Love on tour around Ireland for the first time and along with UK dates.
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
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.
