August lemon pick: Carving the Stone by For those I Love

​One of my claims to fame is that as an 11 year old girl, David Balfe (real name of the artist known as For Those I Love) and I trained together in Karate and once he kicked me so hard in the chest and winded me that I had to be carried out like a rag doll.  

Carving the Stone hit me with the same raw familiarity—it sounds like walking our streets with all their contradictions. Where his debut mourned a friend, this record mourns the city itself. Balfe captures the feeling so many of us carry: love for home mixed with exhaustion at what it’s becoming. With lines like “Where’s the pride in this city? I won’t survive in this city,” it doesn’t feel abstract—it feels like overhearing your own neighbour at the bus stop. The production mirrors that mood, shifting between hard, jagged techno pulses and tender piano or folk-tinged textures, as if the soundscape itself is caught between resistance and remembrance.

What makes it powerful is how he channels private grief into something communal. The rage in Mirror or the nostalgia of “Sunday morning, tea in the pot and the fry is on” aren’t just his—they’re ours too. The album is unflinching in its anger at Dublin’s cultural decay, but there’s solidarity in it as well, a stubborn refusal to give up on the place. As a Dubliner listening, it feels like a reminder that even as the city takes from us, there’s still something worth holding onto—and worth carving into stone.