For Those I Love: ‘I totally understand why people in Ireland feel so disheartened’

Dublin is both symbol and siren for David Balfe, brimming with love and purpose but also alive with conflict and collapse. Born in the city, he records under the name For Those I Love and creates spiralling electronica-energised essays about Ireland in all its shapes.

His self-titled debut album in 2021 addressed the suicide of his close friend and collaborator Paul Curran and his new album, the uncompromising Carving the Stone, is a novelistic album about hardscrabble existence, psychological unfurling, class divisions and digital communication in the Irish capital still reeling from the brutal implosion of the Celtic Tiger in 2008 and the resulting recession that bitterly dragged on until 2014. 

“I didn’t approach the idea of a second record with a concept in mind,” says Balfe. “The first record deals with death and grief in such a strong way. But there was a secondary theme there of class study. The second record is absolutely about grief and death as well; it’s just not about grief and death related to a person.”

Get the latest news and insight into how the Big Issue magazine is made by signing up for the Inside Big Issue newsletter

Words matter deeply to Balfe. Meanings have to be precise and all-encompassing. “The place I love is falling quickly to its knees, I can’t let the bad thing take a hold of me,” he insists in his defiant Dublin brogue on This is Not the Place I Belong. On No Scheme he bewails “a city that’s lost its shape, held together by surveillance and vapes”. Mirror is like being in a basement club at 3am hearing a Ted Talk about the horror unfurling above at street level.

“Paddy Pintman, scabby joints man, happy slapping, stabbing, always bragging, what’s the point man,” he wails, building to the crescendo of the word “cunt” shouted out a dozen times in frenetic succession. Like Stewart Lee’s use of repetition to drive comedic awkwardness, he says the cunt-blizzard is (intentionally) “ridiculous” and “near slapstick”. 

Read more:

• What’s behind the enduring appeal of Paul Weller?
• Homelessness ‘should not exist in a country that values human life’, says Alt-J star Gus Unger-Hamilton
• Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie: ‘It was hard to get artists to take part in Gig for Gaza’

He left Dublin for rural Leitrim, on the opposite side of the country, to find space and perspective to write. “I did it to get away from the immediacy of the distractions of Dublin.” This Bon Iver-style retreat did not work. As soon as he got back to Dublin, plugging back into the grid, the ideas and themes finally exploded, trying to make sense of a country in free-fall, grappling with the housing crisis, unemployment, mental health issues, buried shame and more.

Balfe is of the generation that left school to enter the adult world just as the Irish economy tanked and gentrification, driven by the Irish government’s courting of tech companies with extraordinary tax incentives, created a ferocious class-based disparity in wealth and opportunity. “Everything had skyrocketed – not just house prices but rent as well,” he says. “It started from the city centre and slowly spread out. It massively impacted working-class areas.”

He argues that people of his age felt increasingly powerless, breeding apolitical feelings. “I understand the reasons why so many of my peers don’t want to engage with the general politics of Ireland,” he says. “They have engaged again and again, but it has felt like it has made no difference at all.” He adds, “I totally understand why people feel so disheartened at a nationwide level

His parents’ generation were still dealing with the national trauma of systemic sexual abuse in the Catholic church, the medieval brutality of the Christian Brothers and the impossible horrors of the Magdalene Laundries. The psychological scars might change shape over generations, but they cut just as deep. 

“You might understand why people would want to isolate [themselves] from that as that level of trauma was so widespread and so ubiquitous,” he says. 

Closing track I Came Back to See the Stone Had Moved is about standing optimism against the bleakness of much of the album, putting a bagpiper playing Amazing Grace into a new context.

“That is something you hear at funerals and is usually noted as a marker of an end of life,” he says. “I tried to reframe that into something that feels euphoric.”

Fáilte Ireland will be unlikely to use any of the music from this album to boost tourist numbers, but here is an honest depiction of modern Ireland in all its enveloping chaos and comfort as well as its shuddering ugliness and beauty. 

Carving the Stone is out now on September Recordings.

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. 

Reader-funded since 1991 – Big Issue brings you trustworthy journalism that drives real change.

Every day, our journalists dig deeper, speaking up for those society overlooks.

Could you help us keep doing this vital work? Support our journalism from £5 a month.