For Those I Love review: This extraordinary debut is like a secret diary

David Balfe melds lively, often beautiful dance music and starkly personal spoken word on this powerful record
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David Smyth26 March 2021

A Radio 4 documentary broadcast last week looked at music’s preoccupation with the age 17, what the writer Laura Barton called “this thin place between childhood and adulthood that’s proved so alluring to songwriters”. This extraordinary debut from Dubliner David Balfe can be added to the list.

“There’s not a lot of steps between peace and utter misery/When you’re 17 and all you have is love and dreams,” he says in a thick accent over sparkling electronica on To Have You. The dance music he creates is lively and often beautiful, scattered with high vocal samples, but sounds far away, as though the fun happened long ago. The real focus is Balfe’s starkly personal spoken word delivery, which deals mostly with the loss of his best friend, poet and former bandmate Paul Curran, to suicide in 2018.

There are comparisons to be made with the storytelling and pirate radio beats of The Streets, and the arty house music of French duo The Blaze – both of whom are namechecked in the lyrics – as well as the productions of Jamie xx, nostalgic for raving days he was too young to experience at the time.

But this is something all its own, sampled voicemails and grimly rendered details that come across like a diary you shouldn’t be reading. Now 29, Balfe is processing his memories in a powerful way that must hurt to share. “I deserve to make it through these traumas,” he says on The Shape of You. He does.

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