This was the ear-worming track which grabbed our attention first time round and now it’s set to do it all again, except on a considerably blown-up scale.
David Balfe’s uncompromising Dublin love letter to a best friend Paul Curran, who died by suicide, is ablaze with visceral passion and pain. Birthday/The Pain is a nostalgic throwback to the carefree euphoria of youth, the endless summers, the perpetual shimmer of dreams to be lived. And then you listen to the lyrics. Director Sam Davis has smartly frozen time in his video adding poignancy to a track which one hopes will be a soundtrack to happiness again, the triumph of the will and the dearly departed.
“This video is a journey through a landscape of memories – a train of thought. Created using a process called photogrammetry, thousands of photos were stitched together using AI to produce giant 3D models. These scenes, inspired by long chats with Dave and from the lyrics themselves, touch on the past, loss, freedom and addiction. Something we all face at some point,” says Davis who after hearing of how the track was put together, through the use of old recordings, WhatsApp messages and samples, decided to approach the video in a similar way, combining multiples of of images in order to create one solid piece.
The self-titled debut album of For Those I Love is out on March 26 on September Recordings.
