FOR THOSE I LOVE ANNOUNCE NEW ALBUM “CARVING THE STONE”
OUT AUGUST 8TH ON SEPTEMBER RECORDINGS
ANNOUNCES UK + IRISH TOUR
SHARES NEW SINGLE “NO SCHEME“
Photo Credit: Rich Gilligan
Selected praise for the debut album from For Those I Love:
“Remarkable”
The Sunday Times – Album Of The Week
“A staggering album”
The Independent – ✭✭✭✭✭
“Extraordinary debut”
The Evening Standard – ✭✭✭✭✭
“A remarkable album”
The Irish Times – ✭✭✭✭✭
“An exorcism of grief on the dancefloor”
The Guardian – Album Of The Week
“An immaculate debut”
NME – ✭✭✭✭✭
“The album we need”
Dork – ✭✭✭✭✭
For Those I Love, the brainchild of Dublin producer, visual artist and songwriter David Balfe, today announce that their second album, “Carving The Stone”, is set for release on August 8th via September Recordings.
In support of the album, For Those I Love will tour Ireland for the first time and perform their biggest UK tour yet.
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.
To access the pre-sale, pre-order the new album from the official store:
http://forthoseilove.ffm.to/
Sign up to the For Those I Love mailing list for updates and reminders:
https://drop.cobrand.com/d/
FOR THOSE I LOVE LIVE:
Tuesday 23rd September – The Fleece, Bristol
Thursday 25th September – Islington Assembly Hall, London
Sunday 28th September – Gorilla, Manchester
Monday 29th September – Room 2, Glasgow
Wednesday 1st October – Limelight 2, Belfast
Thursday 2nd October – Cyprus Ave, Cork
Friday 3rd October – Mike The Pies, Listowel
Sunday 5th October – Black Box, Galway
Monday 6th October – 3Olympia Theatre, Dublin
Following For Those I Love’s acclaimed return last month with “Of The Sorrows”, his first new material since 2021, he also shares a second single from the record, a sequel of sorts to a highlight from the debut, in the form of “No Scheme”.
On “No Scheme”, Balfe 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.
He had the following to say about the themes of his new single:
“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, it’s 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.”
LISTEN / WATCH “NO SCHEME” HERE
LISTEN / WATCH “OF THE SORROWS” HERE
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.
PRE-ORDER HERE
For Those I Love
Carving The Stone
Out August 8th on September Recordings
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