Three years on from his devastatingly raw self-titled debut, David Balfe returns as For Those I Love with Carving the Stone, a record that feels both broader in scope and sharper in its incisions. If the first album was an exorcism – grief made urgent and unfiltered – then Carving the Stone is something colder, more architectural. This is not the sound of loss in the moment, but of grief that has calcified, mapped itself onto place, and embedded deep into the social fabric of a vanishing Dublin.
The album opens with the title track, a deceptively restrained introduction. Gone is the immediate wall of static from the debut; in its place is space—room for silence, for echo, for breath between lines. Yet even in this sparseness, the tension simmers. Balfe’s voice, always toeing the line between fury and fatigue, sketches an Ireland hollowed out by policy and profit. “Carving the Stone” sets the tone not just thematically but structurally, framing the album as an unflinching excavation of both personal and political memory.
That excavation deepens with ‘No Quiet’ and ‘No Scheme’, two tracks that together form the album’s first major emotional swell. The former pulses with tightly wound percussion—claustrophobic, twitchy—while the latter steps back into sparse piano-led introspection, Balfe’s cadence slowed to a crawl. It’s in these shifts that Carving the Stone distinguishes itself: not by abandoning the debut’s sonic palette, but by wielding it with greater discipline and emotional modulation.
At the heart of the record sits ‘The Ox / The Afters’, a clear standout and the album’s most open gesture toward euphoria. Aesthetically, it recalls the emotional heft of ‘I Have a Love’, but there’s less rupture and more resolve here. The duality in the title is mirrored in the track’s construction—moving from grief to gratitude, rage to release. It’s Balfe as survivor rather than mourner, but the past is never out of view. The ghosts are still there; they just dance now, too.
‘Civic’ and ‘Mirror’ follow—two of the record’s most sonically immediate tracks. The former is sharp-edged and unsentimental, its critique of urban policy and cultural erasure wrapped in Balfe’s most rhythmically urgent delivery. The latter, already a pre-release highlight, splits the difference between techno eulogy and late-night prayer, seething in its closing moments with its “cunts, cunts, cunts, cunts, cunts” mantra. It may have club potential, but the song’s real weight lies in the tension between its beat and its burden – grief you can move to, if only just.
But if the middle section of Carving the Stone presents moments of momentum, the final third is where its emotional core fully lands. ‘This Is Not The Place I Belong’ strips everything back to stark, unfiltered dislocation. There’s no theatricality here, just the quiet ache of someone recognising they’ve outlived their landscape. ‘Of the Sorrows’, on the other hand, reaches outward, gently uplifting without ever feeling indulgent. It’s one of the rare points where the album dares to suggest that connection is still possible—that loss can coexist with love without being consumed by it.
The album closes on ‘I Came Back To See The Stone Had Moved’, a title that says more than most full verses. It’s Balfe’s most succinct summary of the emotional terrain he’s spent two albums surveying: the feeling of returning to something that no longer exists, of being a stranger in your own life, your own street, your own city. The track doesn’t end so much as it ebbs away, unresolved but necessary – like all grief worth naming.
Where For Those I Love once relied on catharsis, Carving the Stone trades in clarity. It’s not as explosive or immediate as its predecessor, and for some that will matter. But it’s a more patient, more politically situated piece of work—one that favours depth over drama. Balfe isn’t just memorialising anymore; he’s documenting, accusing, remembering, and – most crucially – continuing.