For Those I Love - Carving The Stone CD

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 pretty, 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 paychecks, 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.”