For Those I Love, the brainchild of Dublin producer, visual artist and songwriter David Balfe, returns with new single, ‘Of The Sorrows’. Accompanied by a self-directed video, Balfe had the following to say about For Those I Love’s new material:
“When I wrote ‘Of The Sorrows’, it felt like I was bargaining with myself. It was one of the first songs I’d written to myself, for myself, while still trying to embody the feelings and thoughts of my closest peers. At its heart, ‘Of The Sorrows”‘is about a city rapidly boxing you out, and the choices you make in order to stay.
I started to shoot the video for ‘Of The Sorrows’ on Christmas Day. I traded a couple hundred hours, a broken hard drive (had to start again), my sense of patience, and a broken leg I got on the last day of filming. But I could make peace with that deal. It felt good to give so much life to a project about a dying city.”
In 2021, Balfe released his self-titled debut album which went on to win Ireland’s prestigious Choice Music Prize in 2022 and its emotive lead single ‘I Have A Love’ has been immortalised in an Overmono remix that is a euphoric highlight of their live sets to this day. ‘Of The Sorrows’ retains Balfe’s considered, direct wordplay. We hear the voice of an elderly Irishman reflecting on the gravity of abandoning his homeland. Choking on his own sadness, he points at the Ireland-themed posters on his bedsit wall: “I had to leave it but I want to die in it.” Like many of his generation, Balfe has had similarly conflicting thoughts about emigration.
He feels rejected by Dublin, but struggles to wrap his head around leaving: whichever path he chooses feels like a painful compromise. Although taking flight feels like an appropriate response to what can be a suffocating existence, one where you can bankrupt yourself “just to stay where you belong”, how, he asks later on in the song, his voice cracking with vulnerability, “could you leave without putting up a fight?”
“I don’t know if it’s possible to stay and live a life in Dublin where there is even a modicum of comfort,” he says, further complicating the picture, “without actively making the city more difficult to live in over the long run.”
Why the prolonged time between music releases? Balfe explains:
“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. Then one day it all just started to come out.”
You can trace the genesis for ‘Of The Sorrows’ back not to one single moment but to the accumulating dread felt walking around his home city of Dublin. It slowly dawned on him that he couldn’t leave his apartment without pummelling observations, couplets, and ideas into his notes app. If he were to commit to a follow-up, Balfe couldn’t face revisiting the same topics: re-traumatising himself was not an option. After realising that a second album was an artistic necessity, he patiently turned these scrawls into verses and, in his cramped home studio, produced instrumentals to make musical sense of how he was feeling.
For more information on For Those I Love please check their website and instagram.
