If a horror film is so good that it becomes Oscar-worthy, people call it a thriller instead of horror. Carving The Stone is an album that will be called ‘spoken word’ instead of rap because of the staggering quality of the character sketches and storytelling, unfolding with heartbreaking detail across every single verse.

There’s no singing, just a relentless flood of words, but it’s not rooted in grime or trap. David Balfe’s staggering delivery is distinctly rooted in Irish cadences, with a quick and nimble flow delivering stories of people on buses and outside pubs as their lives spiral. It’s delivered with deep love and deep fury. The beats recall the skeletal architecture of euphoric techno, but they almost never explode. They hover evoking tired dawn drives and cold city streets, and Balfe uses this tension and restraint to wring out unbearable emotional weight.

There are flashes of traditional Irish fiddles, flutes, and marching drums blurring seamlessly into the electronics. The Ox / The Afters carries the tragic story of an old alcoholic boxer who’s lost everything into one of the best character studies we’ve heard this year, with Balfe painting an entire life in just a few unbelievable verses. On No Scheme, the line ‘a city that’s lost its shape, held together by surveillance and vapes’ captures not just Dublin, but the modern condition of cities everywhere. There are multiple references to Ireland’s new techno-feudalistic role, becoming a host body for global tech corporations whose interests have nothing to do with the Irish people. Balfe captures what it feels like to live in a country being slowly hollowed out, the sound of someone who deeply loves his home watching it be dismantled in real time.

This is a furious record drenched in love for place, people, and memory. Technically it’s rap, but it’s also folk poetry, Irish techno, social commentary, grief, rage, hometown elegy, and an extremely moving redefinition of what political music can sound like in 2025.

It’s impossible to listen to this powerful record without thinking about the helplessness, the housing crisis, and the yawning gap between the working-class and the elite decision-makers reshaping their futures. Carving The Stone is packed with tension between belonging and betrayal, grounded in real stories about real people and real sorrow. There’s a grey, heavy stillness posing the question of what you can do in this situation, and David Balfe has chosen to make great art. Documenting his despair as a form of pure resistence, there’s no easy hope, rallying cry, or exit strategy. Balfe is staring directly into the rot of the modern world and refusing to look away.

The language is impossibly dense and rich, flipping between poetic laments and furious political commentary, referencing cutting-edge concepts with a proud Irishness in content and storytelling. This is the same instinct that powered W.B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Sinéad O’Connor, and all the folk singers who came before whilst the music pulls in the opposite direction, with minimalist, skeletal techno and ambient electronics that feel more Berlin than Ballymun. The rooted heritage of Ireland meets the ghostly weightlessness of 21st-century electronic production in a striking fusion that explores what happens when a place with a soul is turned into a cold site of data harvesting.

Of The Sorrows is a devastating five-minute slow-burn that begins with an elderly woman softly pleading “Stay here in Ireland and I’ll never see you distressed”, the least likely sample on a rap album, set aganst pianos that drift in like low-hanging clouds. Across the track’s length, the atmosphere tightens until Balfe finally erupts “I have to leave” in a manner that’s visceral and raw, a scream of real despair as the underlying bass creeps upwards like an escalator that never reaches the top, circling with nowhere to land. Throughout the whole album everything builds and tension compounds, but there’s very rarely the neat satisfying drop we’re trained to expect. The music instead hovers in the uneasy void space before the payoff. No release is coming to save us.

Mirror is the albums most explicitly rave-ready moment, unleashing a brutal techno thud howling with frustration at how nationalism cannibalises its own. Whether this album shakes people awake, makes them feel heard, or names something we couldn’t put into words ourselves, Carving The Stone is a colossal artistic triumph that captures the global mood. If there’s no hope in the system, then the hope is in art like this.