FOR THOSE I LOVE RETURNS WITH 'MIRROR'

Image: Hugh Quberzky.

David Balfe, the force behind the musical project For Those I Love, returns with Mirror, a blistering new single that continues to signal a striking evolution in both tone and intent ahead of his second album, Carving The Stone, due August 8th via September Recordings. Where his debut was shaped by personal loss and intimate grief, “Mirror” sees Balfe widen the scope of his outrage, turning a poetic and political eye toward the corrosive effects of modern capitalism on his native Dublin.

Accompanied by a raw, visually arresting video directed by Niall Trask, Mirror is Balfe at his most visceral - furious, focused, and unsparingly articulate. With pounding percussion and unsettling urgency, the track channels the chaos of city life into a searing confrontation with class inequality and social betrayal. In one of the song’s most cutting lines, Balfe rages: "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."

This isn't anger for its own sake - it's clarity. Balfe has described his new record as a response to a cultural suffocation, a feeling of societal erosion that became impossible to ignore. “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,” he explains. “Then one day it all just started to come out.”

Carving The Stone promises to be a dense and daring chronicle of life under digital feudalism, where soaring strings and dance-floor synths crash into everyday realities of debt, displacement, and disenchantment. Where his 2021 debut found healing in memory, this new era sounds like an exorcism - of illusions, of silence, of complicity.

Carving The Stone is out August 8. Watch the visual for Mirror below.