‘I would never, ever begrudge somebody for wanting to get out of Ireland'

Irish Times

a day ago

David Balfe
is hard to get hold of. He has switched off notifications on his phone and checks his messaging apps only infrequently. 'It's really f**king hard to do,' he says. It's an act of self-preservation.
In the messages, which are often beautifully written, and can amount to miniature novels, he says, people tell the musician how he has changed their lives. He has received thousands, and the flow never stops.
'I wouldn't be here if I hadn't heard your music,' many say. The messages reassure Balfe that he's on the right path, but in some ways the weight is unbearable.
Fame has also taken its toll on him. In 2018 Balfe's best friend and fellow musician Paul Curran died by suicide. In the aftermath he compiled some electronic beats he had been working on, full of samples and unique in character, and added spoken-word lyrics.
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What began as a small release intended for his friends and family, under the name For Those I Love, quickly found a home in the hearts of strangers who discovered his music online. Later, when the September label picked it up for an official release, in 2021, he became a star, in his own quiet, unassuming way.
For anybody also going through grief, the
self-titled album
feels like a tight hug, articulating vulnerability as few others have done in this type of music.
Balfe was on stage at a festival in Belgium the night before we meet, contributing a song to a set by the Welsh electronic duo Overmono. It's a remix of I Have a Love, the standout song from that first album.
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For Those I Love review: A stark reflection of grief and pain in wake of suicide
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'There are strangers wailing and coming back to life again as you play the song,' he says. 'I had to go behind the stage last night to take a breather and have a bit of a cry and text my partner.' There's a reason why he doesn't perform very often, he says.
'I have never played that song, be it in my own shows or with Overmono, without seeing pockets of people who are clearly there together grieving somebody,' says the musician, who also performed the track with Overmono at this year's Glastonbury festival.
'You can see pockets of five or six people all holding each other together. Sometimes it's just emotional celebration of what I imagine to be somebody's life.'
Balfe is about to release his second album, Carving the Stone. It's a hot summer's day, and we're on his home turf, in north Dublin, to walk around Coolock and Donaghmede, places he brings to life in his music. Dressed head to toe in black, he is warm and gregarious, a far cry from the grief-stricken poet we encounter in his art.
We head for a pedestrian motorway underpass where he would come with friends in his early 20s; for some soccer pitches he once scored goals on; for the Church of the Holy Trinity, which he says teenagers would climb as a rite of passage; and Kay's Kitchen at Donaghmede Shopping Centre, a formative space for Balfe when he was on the cusp of adulthood. He orders coffee and orange juice, and we find a seat.
For Those I Love: David Balfe at Kay's Kitchen in Donaghmede Shopping Centre. Photograph: Bryan O'Brien
For Those I Love: the playing pitches of David Balfe's youth. Photograph: Bryan O'Brien
Photograph: Bryan O'Brien
When he's chatting Balfe is free-flowing and personable, but every word becomes deliberate, almost surgically precise, when he's talking about something important, or sensitive.
Seconds pass between some of his words when he's remembering Curran, for example. There's still pain here, and a lot of love. 'I've tried to be very, very particular with this new record, not to revisit the concepts of the first,' he says. 'Partially because I just can't – my soul doesn't have it in it any more ... With that said, if anybody asks me to talk about Paul it's with utter joy I remember him.
For Those I Love: David Balfe. Photograph: Bryan O'Brien
'I don't think it would be right to pass up an opportunity to say he was a remarkably beautiful person and incredibly sturdy friend, and he had a fascinating intelligence and hunger for knowledge ... The best art that I ever made, be it music or film, was made very closely in tandem with Paul.'
If Balfe's first album was an ode to Curran and to his friends and family, Carving the Stone feels closer to a rallying call against a breakdown of the social contract in Ireland. The array of topics Balfe broaches is dizzying – cultural strangulation, emigration, far-right politics, technofeudalism, boredom, alienation, mental health – yet the core of the record remains the sense of love and grief that permeates all his work.
On the track No Scheme he laments a Dublin he scarcely recognises any more, 'a city that's lost its shape, held together by surveillance and vapes with some distant memory of a better past ... Now I'm reading comment-section politics from genocidal hollow pricks. I'm sick. Get me out of here, please.'
He calls on the listener to 'seize the means of chronic boredom from the bourgeoisie'. 'This city needs a saviour,' he declares. What kind of saviour, he admits now, he doesn't know; his plea is driven by a desire for a simple solution, even though he knows it can be anything but.
His memories of the motorway underpass come from another era, another way of living. 'There's something really magical about feeling like you know somewhere entirely inside out, and then finding a new addition to your life within that space, within the same geography you've walked for 10 to 15 years,' he says.
Balfe and his friends would kick footballs off the walls and talk about music, films and the ups and downs of life. It gave the group an independence, a sense of a different world. 'Because it's this mystery area in between pockets of obvious community and culture, this just takes up a bit of an anonymous space. It feels a little bit more lawless.'
The underpass walls, once brought to life by a succession of graffiti tags and notes from passersby, have since been painted white. This strikes Balfe as a retreat from what gave this place life.
'When we first came down, we were writing on top of what felt like years and years' worth of other people's scrawling, and none of it was particularly pictorial. It was people's names.
'A lot of it felt like real-time memorialisation: you're seeing these markings that people wrote of their own name, or of them and their friends', and it's a statement: 'I was here at this time. I was alive.' And I think there's something really powerful about that.'
With the history painted over, the space takes on a new orientation, for new teenagers to claim.
Boredom comes up a lot on Carving the Stone. Balfe blames the 'cycle of algorithmic tunnel vision' caused by social media: as well as Fomo, or the fear of missing out, that accompanies what has become a primary reference point in modern culture, 'great swathes of your time are spent just scrolling a never-ending feed of predominantly useless information.
For Those I Love: David Balfe in the pedestrian motorway underpass in Donaghmede. Photograph: Bryan O'Brien
'The feeling of boredom seems, within my life and many of my peers', to be more present than ever,' he says, 'yet, at the same time, the feeling of immediate satisfaction is more pertinent than ever too.
'The ability to be mentally satiated by what I guess young people call brain rot, or whatever, seems to just mask the boredom until you remove the phone or the laptop for a second, and that sense of boredom becomes even more vast, even more pertinent, stronger again and louder – and we combat that once more with going back to the well and re-engaging with it, giving our data back to the machine.'
Balfe's struggles with technology – with an increasingly taut space that rewards the binary, and where our diminished attention spans make us look for distilled, simplified content – are also a theme of the album.
He references Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by
Yanis Varoufakis
. Balfe has reread it several times. Lately, however, he has opted to listen to a 30-minute summary of the book that he says was probably created by artificial intelligence. 'There is a great irony with having an AI summary of a book on technofeudalism.'
Although he has tried to reject social media outright, Balfe begins each day with a scroll on Telegram, seeking out conflict reporting and 'thought pieces from people who have radically different views than me. I think it's very important for me to constantly have my viewpoint challenged if I want to be able to hold it with a sense of internal authority,' he says. 'And I'm a bit fearful of the echo chamber.'
On the album track Mirror, Balfe tackles the insidiousness of ethno-staters, which is to say people who want to make the State ethnically homogenous. I ask him about the song, and the jolting chant of 'c***s' at its close.
'I feel like [ethno-staters] have been able to fool people who are suffering into thinking the way out of this is to continue to punch down further, as opposed to collectivising and working toward a common goal of improving the lives of all working people – all minority people – against the better interest of the ruling class,' he says.
'They've done an incredible job at convincing people that those who are most like them are most unlike them, that the answer to progress is further hate towards those who deserve it least and need it least, and that does nothing other than benefit a ruling class and people with a very specific ethno-state agenda.'
That Ireland is an increasingly untenable place to make a life has led some towards the fringe and driven many to leave altogether. On his new track Of the Sorrows, Balfe oscillates between a sense that this place may no longer be for him and chasing something that once was.
There's something haunting about the song, about the tragic dance that young people in Ireland perform, and the indecision between 'I have to leave' and 'I'll never leave'.
'The trade just hasn't been equal,' Balfe says. 'What I'm giving here, I'm not getting in return. The cost of living is so high, and what you receive in return is so low except for the love of friends and family – which has no cost; there's nothing that I would ever trade for that.
'So many of my peers have left, and I applaud every one of them who has left and found what they're looking for. I would never, ever begrudge somebody for wanting to get out of this. I understand why so many of the people that I love have looked around and said, 'How can I justify staying when I give so much just to live in a box room?''
Balfe is generous with his time as we walk – his only concern is to be able to buy a Shelbourne FC ticket at 7pm. (He's an enthusiastic Shels fan, and our chats drift in and out of soccer.)
The musician is not religious, but the local church took up a mythological space in Balfe's mind when he was growing up. As a rite of passage, teenagers would climb its steep roof and stand atop the cross.
'When people go into Donaghmede they go, 'Yous have a f**kin mad church, don't you?'' he says as we approach the distinctive building, the four sides of which have sharply angled roofs that lean against one another. 'It's very hard for me, and some of my friends, to talk about [Donaghmede] without referencing the church.'
For Those I Love: David Balfe at the Church of the Holy Trinity in Donaghmede. Photograph: Bryan O'Brien
Balfe never climbed it. Soon before it would have been the singer's turn, one unfortunate boy fell and broke both legs. (According to local lore, he managed to cycle all the way home afterwards.) 'With that, people were, like, 'No más.' So, in my head, that person – who will go unnamed – is the last true Donaghmeder. I haven't heard of anybody doing it since.' He's quick to add that it's not something he'd advise anybody to try, either.
'Like I was saying about people writing messages on walls, there's a cultural narrative to places that make them what they are,' he says. 'The idea of building importance into things that traditional culture or the State or your parents would tell you is silly, or without value, is something that comes up a lot across this record.'
'Carving the stone' – chipping away at a project to reveal a finished core – is a phrase Balfe has found himself using when asked about his music. 'You start with this mess – a big wall of sound, a large stone – and you're slowly chipping away and revealing the image or the narrative that you want to tell at the end.
'I think it's also very reflective of the process of making the record, which took years. It was a really, really long process, a very laborious, intense and extremely exhausting process – probably a lot more so than the first record,' he says.
'Maybe you're losing parts of yourself in the process, but ultimately you're doing it in order to try and find that thing at the core, like a new sense of beauty, a new sense of self and, ultimately, a new sense of emotional security.'
In the spring of 2023 Balfe spent a month secluded in a house in Co Leitrim, with little more than wild goats for occasional company.
'I wrote from morning until night every single day,' he says. 'I'd stand outside sometimes and shadowbox and do some push-ups. Otherwise I was back inside writing – and I just wrote garbage. Absolute garbage. I was forcing something I wasn't ready to write. And I think I needed to remember that all the best writing I've done has been at home.'
He finds it cliched to recount now: on his final day in Leitrim, after he'd packed up most of his gear, he felt a draw to try one last time. He'd soon written the chords for the final track on the album, I Came Back to See the Stone Had Moved, by far its most distinctive and uplifting song.
The name gets at a sort of resurrection Balfe felt when he returned to Dublin. Still, there's a deeper layer of meaning stemming from 'something a little bit darker and more valuable, something I'm a little bit more uncomfortable to speak about but coming back to a desire to be here'.
Its piano chords, uncertain, gradually build into something cohesive and propelling. Balfe revisits harrowing themes from earlier on the album and drips in pieces of hope – hope about building a 'better cultural and social future for working people in Ireland', he says.
It 'ultimately arrives at a very life-affirming point, a very brazen statement on the desire to be alive and to be here. And I think the writing was reflective of the place that I was arriving to in my own self through years of work, great therapy and incredible love from the people around me.'
I try to dig a little deeper, but Balfe is hesitant. 'I'd probably hold on to an element of privacy around some of the lyrics on the record,' he says. 'Despite the fact that this record is a record that I'm sharing publicly – with the knowledge that I'm sharing it publicly, unlike the first one – there are still parts of it that are written very directly for just my friends ... I'd never want to get to a place with this project where it turns its back on what it originally was.'
Listen closely and at certain points on the album you can hear Balfe talking in the background, buried odes to the people he cares about, to make them part of Carving the Stone's DNA.
At the close of the final song there's a thunderous bagpipe interpretation of Amazing Grace. Here, transformed, the hymn becomes a euphoric counterpoint to the dark insularity of other parts of the album. Balfe's final lyric, 'I'm choosing to live,' bookends a project he's not sure has a future but can only reflect an artist secure in himself, in a city that gets stranger by the day.
Carving the Stone is released by
September