For Those I Love

Following his performance to a packed crowd at Glastonbury over the weekend, and to coincide with the announcement of his long-awaited sophomore album Carving The Stone, which is set for release on 1st August, Dublin creative project For Those I Love has announced details of his UK & Irish Tour, which includes shows in Mike The Pies, Listowel on 1st October, Cyprus Avenue, Cork on 2nd October, Limelight 2, Belfast on 3rd October, Black Box, Galway on 5th October and 3Olympia Theatre, Dublin on 6th October 2025. 

Dublin tickets €29.20 / €34.15 (Inc Booking Fee & Venue Restoration Levy) on sale Friday 4th July at 10AM from Ticketmaster.ie.  Bookings Subject To 12.5% Service Charge Per Ticket (Max €10.50)
Regional tickets on sale Friday 4th July at 10AM. Prices may vary, please see venue websites for more information.

David Balfe’s only company for a month was a herd of curious wild goats. Used to the kinetic buzz of the city, the poet-producer also known as For Those I Love was feeling somewhat out of sorts after decamping to a secluded part of Leitrim, one of Ireland’s most rural counties, to write music for his sophomore album. “I wrote relentlessly every day and it was all garbage,” he sighs.

Yet on the final day, surrounded by his half-packed gear, Balfe wrote chords that wound up at the beginning of ‘I Came Back To See The Stone Had Moved,’ the curtain-closer to his exhilaratingly existential second record, Carving the Stone. Feeling separated from his loved ones and “unable to hear Dublin speak to him”, he returned home to his flat, where, over several years, he carefully assembled what “felt like the first album I have made for myself in about a decade”.

On his ambitious second album, 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.”

Hushed but vicious, his voice sounds clearer—and angrier—than ever; the distinct voice of a street philosopher, a radical polemicist, and a confessional poet rolled into one hyperliterate ex-raver. Dublin is, as one lyric goes, ‘in bed with techno-feudalism,’ a theory which argues that we have undergone a transition to a post-capitalist world in which we are all digital serfs, enslaved by our new feudal overlords in Silicon Valley. On ‘Mirror’ (his most propulsive song to date, driven by thumping drums), he describes almost being stabbed as a crime of lesser proportions than everyday class war: ‘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’.

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.