Carving The Stone

by Diarmuid Flood

“The second album draws heavily from conversations I’ve had over the past four or five years — about where we fit in the world, how quickly things are changing, and the growing sense of instability. We talked constantly about the uncertainty of the future, trying to make sense of it all.” David Balfe in TheFader.com [1]

After the international success of his first album, producer and performer David Balfe took four years out from releasing and performing new music. His first album, For Those I Love, of which his project shares the same name, was intensely personal. Multiple tracks focus on the loss of his best friend and fellow performer, Paul Curran; while tracks like ‘Top Scheme’ centre the working class communities across Ireland struggling to exist, abandoned by a political establishment that doesn’t understand or care for them.

This blending of the personal and political is carried forward in his latest project Carving the Stone, which touches on societal instability, inequality, and a growing sense of desperation.

‘This trade wasn’t made to be equal’

“Is it the postcode divide?
Am I lost by design?
Is it the roll of the dice that keeps me
Gone or alive?”

Instability is a common feeling in Irish society. For many, housing is unaffordable or completely unobtainable. The cost of living is rising, and simply existing seems subject to rapidly depleting funds. A sense of place and community can be increasingly hard to come by. Hotels and office blocks are squeezing community and culture out. The little you manage to save is swept away by a night out or a trip to the GP. This sort of instability breeds frustration, desperation, and a sense that things can’t be changed. All of this is captured vividly in Carving the Stone. Repeat tracks develop a feeling that Irish society is rotting from the inside out:

Now the romance is fading, there's no pay to be saving
The blood is draining a state, the place gone stale and it's failing
A city that's lost its shape
Held together by surveillance and vapes
With some distant memory of a better past

Balfe, like many, can feel his surroundings becoming more unlivable. A comfortable job and a house, no longer a sure thing. In an interview with Big Issue, Balfe elaborates on the feeling of powerlessness:

“I understand the reasons why so many of my peers don’t want to engage with the general politics of Ireland…, They have engaged again and again, but it has felt like it has made no difference at all…, I totally understand why people feel so disheartened at a nationwide level.” [2]

Tracks like ‘No Scheme’ are saturated with feelings of anger as he watches those he loves ‘fight to breathe’ in a place that’s ‘depressed, depleted, and half-sedated’. Friends jaded and forced to ‘give up on their dreams’ to make a living.

Home and place

Despite this difficulty, the album is far from one-sidedly pessimistic. Among increasingly hostile conditions, Balfe continues to find comfort in his homeplace and the people and culture that give it life:

I was in love with the fixtures
And then beloved in the scriptures
That were written by the hands of my hometown

It’s a common refrain. Ireland is a difficult place to make a life in, but at the same time, unmatched when it comes to people; when it comes to art and song; when it comes to having a laugh. Even in the instability, solace can be found in the comfort of others. Their ability to give voice to the worst feelings and at the same time shrug it off in an ‘ah, sure look’. In a ‘holy mother of jaysus lord save us’. This comes through most clearly in the track ‘Civic’:

Now the only way that I find ease
Is in the peaceful arms of mates
In the worlds of written words
And in the art of my home place
I’ve gained some distance from the source
Pray I return to those estates
Where the ink would run forever
And the songs filled every day

As with his previous projects and songs, like ‘You Live’, Balfe is clear in his reverence for the place he grew up, for the art it’s inspired, and for the people he’s come to know. 

The working man is all I’ve known

The only ones I've ever loved
All live within this neighbourhood
And I don't think I'll ever leave

‘Another one for the people of Donaghmede’ Balfe remarks during his 2020 performance at Other Voices festival before playing ‘Brendan’ - an ode to his neighbour, a ‘working class hero without the fame’ as Balfe describes him. Tributes to the people in his life have been a constant throughout his career, and Carving the Stone is no different. It rings with his fondness for family and friends. A love for their ways and mannerisms, the ‘holy mother of jaysus lord save us’ he’s heard a thousand times, Balfe has always painted these pictures in rich colour. His first project, the 2020 mixtape ‘Into A World That Doesn’t Understand It, Unless You’re From It’ opens with a track that describes in vivid detail his encounter with a school friend, now years later lost and suffering from homelessness and drug abuse, another person in his life chewed up by the brutality of the system:

Mid-way through another tale 
I notice the dirt under his nails and the burns on his hands
there’s no treatment really free in this land
see one day he was here, and then he disappeared
and we always knew he lived in fear

In Carving the Stone, he continues to develop a picture of working class life. ‘No Quiet’ depicts a woman struggling to survive while her family is lost to poverty and incarceration:

Her brother Danny loved her just like a Mother
Still used the old namеs for all the new roads
She lovеd him most when he came home alone with silver
But he broke her heart when he stayed out to hunt for gold 

While focusing on hardship and loss, the album also takes the time to communicate the vibrancy and defiance of working class people. The third track, ‘The Ox’, stands clear in this regard. The song focuses on a boxer, John Martin, from Balfe’s estate:

He buried stout and cider
Made his name as a local fighter
And he’d shout about the beatings that he took from priests
They kicked him from the Inn, he’d go out and try his luck again

He tried to drown himself to find some inner peace

While the track gives a sense of the precarity, instability, and sometimes desperation in Martin’s life, Balfe takes the time to also show his strength and character:

Playwright passions, he put the world on a page
He said who needed to finish, when he had the world as his stage

The love and reverence Balfe has for the people he’s encountered through his life is a high point of the album. A necessary and sadly uncommon depiction of the depth of working class people in communities across Ireland. 

‘Blackshirt cunts’

Two of the singles from the album - ‘No Scheme’ and ‘Mirror’ - build on the frustration but most notably also contain references to and a rejection of the ongoing rush to trample those at the bottom: 

I won't seal my fate with the weight of others
Reveal your place or displace my brothers
I won't feel no hate or debase our mothers
And I'm not alone here

Balfe references the repeated hysteria drummed up by ‘Whatsapp groups full of half-truths’ where ‘Boys get bet black and blue and then that video gets sent to you’. A common phenomenon in modern Ireland. A frenzy driven by disaffection and desperation. A collective scramble for a punching bag. You can’t kick up, so you kick out wherever you can. But the important point, referenced throughout, is that this is anything but organic:

How many of us are miseducated?
Inflated by a hate filled rhetoric
With ideologues influencing the city's sprogs like gods
Blackshirt cunts squeezing the life and lungs out of the middle grounds

Fascist and far-right ideologues work hard to take the broadly felt and justified anger and find a scapegoat for it. This is powerfully communicated in the final lines of the track ‘Mirror’. While it’s impossible to replicate the energy of the track, the lines capture the dynamic at play:

Reprobate, ethnostate, modern nationalist cunts
They manipulate young workers and neglect them when done
The modern state will strip a man down until he's naked and scared
These cunting blackshirts will give him a face to lace with his fears
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

Choosing to live

From the passages quoted, it probably feels like Carving the Stone is a mostly grim and pessimistic project. The truth is, it’s fittingly mixed. The album starts by giving a sense that Balfe is feeling the uncertainty of success. A lack of confidence, belief, or motivation. A feeling of weariness:

Now it’s
Products and pay scales
College and day sales
But if I quit there’s no salvation in the hurt
I’ll find no saviour in the dirt 
The drone and tone of constant scroll has grown the boredom in my bones

It’s what the title of the album references. Carving the stone. Working away in the belief that things will get better. That your work will be worth it. And in some sense, the album proves that Balfe has found success in this endeavour. The track ‘Civic’ ends on a triumphant note, a self-assurance gained through the work:

But new ways paid me a visit
I gave the pain its own eviction, wrote for days in praise
Ya heard me say
I existed
I existed

The final track, ‘I Came Back To See The Stone Had Moved’ ends with a committed, triumphant message of hope and appreciation. Love. Place. Friends. A willingness to keep going.

All my time is not behind me
All my lines are still my lines
I’m left awake at night with love and place in mind, I think I’m fine
Every move I make is blinding
Behind each fall I’ve got what’s mine
The love of place and friends, and faith
Now ends aren’t written in my mind

Notes

[1] For Those I Love on tech gentrification, Carving The Stone, and finding a reason to write, The Fader, https://www.thefader.com/2025/08/08/for-those-i-love-carving-the-stone-interview 

[2] For Those I Love: 'I totally understand why people in Ireland feel so disheartened', Big Issue, https://www.bigissue.com/culture/music/for-those-i-love-david-balfe-interview/