Cover Story: Hozier • Beautiful Language

It might not have swept over him like some Hokusai-impressive wave. But Irish folk-rocker Andrew Hozier-Byrne — who records and performs as simply Hozier — has been caught in the subtle currents of spiritual change since he turned 33 this March. It’s the fabled Christ age, when your proper career trajectory is clearly revealed to you, giving you a crucial choice to follow it or not. “I feel that happening, I do, and I feel very good,” the blues-schooled “Take Me to Church” singer says, and it’s a concept perfectly exemplified on his majestic new “Unreal Unearth” album, his third, as well as his recent introductory EP Eat Your Young. “And I think there’s a lot of stuff exorcised on it, a lot of stuff that’s very personal, and there’s some stuff that I’m finally just sitting and coming to peace with and then letting go of.”

And it’s a sea change you can veritably chart, song by carefully-plotted song, over the sixteen generous tracks of Unreal Unearth, beginning with its dual literary-inspired openers, “De Selby (Part 1)” and “De Selby (Part 2),” which starts out Gaelic but quickly tumbles into a tub-thumping R&B rhythm. The serpentine thematic path then wends through the jangling “First Time,” an acrobatic-voiced “Francesca,” the skeletal, string-enhanced ballad “I, Carrion” (based on the myth of Icarus), a falsetto-funky “Eat Your Young,” and the ethereal “Son of Nyx,” wherein Hozier’s voice itself acts as a symphonic instrument. And that’s just the first half of the magnum opus; It then segues into a soul-stirring “All Things End,” the Gaelic-language-inspired piano etude “To Someone from a Warmer Climate (Uiscefhuaraithe),” then a somber keyboard dirge called “Butchered Tongue,” a sonically-complex “Anything But,” the blues-beefy “Unknown,” and a twinkling, monastic-reverent closer, “First Light, which builds to a gorgeous crescendo. What does it all mean? First, Hozier has to paint an appropriately dark pandemic backdrop, how the world closed in on him during the lockdown in his provincial Irish hometown of Wicklow.

“It was a difficult time, and I was on my own, just contending with all of the challenging things that you find the ability not to tackle when you’re busy, or you’re touring,” sighs Hozier. “But I think it’s that thing of, when you finally step off the hamster wheel, you’re kind of forced to sit in the corner and have a look around whatever space you’re in, you know? So I had to do some serious reflecting then, but now, on the far side of it, I feel infinitely more attuned with the much larger natural world as a result.” In the interim, he also found time to issue the 2022 protest single “Swan Upon Leda” (as Roe v Wade was tragically overturned in America); contribute “Blood Upon the Snow” to Bear McCreary’s God of War: Ragnarok video game soundtrack; donate royalties from his police-violence addressing single “Jackboot Jump” to the Black Lives Matter Movement and NAACP. With Saoirse Ronan and Glen Hansard, he is also part of an Irish charity organization called Home Sweet Home, so he has admittedly been blessed with his fair share of artistic distractions. But he’s also happy to break it all down for fans, so they can surf this revitalizing new wave of change alongside him.

HOZIER: Yes. Yes, I guess it is. There is a lot of reflection on it. Uhh, no pun intended! But actually, really, I always really loved water, and even as a child, my mother said I was very hard to get out of it. So I’ve always found it comforting, very calming. And obviously, coming from Ireland, the stuff kind of falls from the sky a great deal, and it’s very often part of the landscape, with 250 days of rain potentially a year. But I think during the pandemic, I was swimming in the sea a lot. At least once a week — even through the winter, because it’s a very different experience during the winter — I would meet with my school friends, my childhood friends, and we would get in the sea every… let’s say Friday morning. And in winter, in particular, you would catch the sunrise, but it was a time of… I dunno. That experience of swimming in the sea is a challenge when it’s so cold, but there’s a wonderful feeling where you can’t help but reflect on being a very, very small thing in a very, very big thing. And it was a very joyful kind of time, where you could catch up with friends in the pandemic. So yeah, I was spending a lot of time by the sea, either walking by the sea—because in lockdown, for anybody living by the coastline, that was the safest place to walk. So I was spending a lot of time by the water, and with water, or in water.

HOZIER: I think there have been moments where you know that you’re out of your depth. There was one winter morning where myself and my buddies met, and we had no business in the water; we really did not. Even in the little seaside town where we would swim, sometimes there would be two helicopter rescues a week during that winter. But the one morning that we got in, the waves were… well, I remember just bobbing on an enormous wave and looking down at the beach that was only a few feet away from me — it was crazy. And being out there with friends? I’ve had moments where I’ve felt like an insect on a bedsheet that had just been wrung out, just been tossed, of feeling very, very tiny and like you’re no longer in control. But I always know when to call it quits, but this time there was a moment when I was in the water that gave me a whole new respect, I would say, for the water, for the sea.

HOZIER: I don’t. I don’t. A man of my coordination and balance? No, I don’t surf when I’m in the water. But I’m a good swimmer, though. I’m a pretty strong swimmer.

IE: I remember years ago Julian Cope would go swimming in the ocean over there with Fungi, the dolphin. Swimming with dolphins was a UK thing.

HOZIER: In Dingle, you can — in the west. And tragically, one loss during the pandemic was that Fungi has been confirmed as being no more. Now, Fungi was nearly 40 years old, so he lived a great life, but it appears that during the pandemic — amid an absolute stacking of misfortune and tragedy — that he’s gone. He’s not been seen again. And I think what took him out, sadly, was just old age. But he was this beloved seaside figure.

HOZIER: I think there is something to that. I don’t go out often to lakes, but I’ve heard that there are these natural currents in lakes that you can’t see, so the surface can be totally still, but underneath the surface, there can be this pull. But also that lack of buoyancy. Like, every time I’ve swam in a lake, I’ve tired so much faster, and just felt this fatigue come on so much quicker, and I’ve had to work so much harder to stay afloat, just because there’s no salt and its buoyancy is far, far less. So definitely, lakes mean business — they’re not to be underestimated, for sure. But I didn’t know that about the ships and aircraft.

HOZIER: I have never had a clear regression or anything I could describe as such. But I will say that I’m not sure if it’s from being raised on an island and always knowing which way the ocean is because from there, I always know which way east, south, north, and west is. But for me, when I’m too long away from the sea, or if I don’t know in what direction the water is, or a large body of water is, I do become slightly disoriented, and a little bit irritated, a little bit restless. So I think having a large body of water nearby, and preferably the sea, is definitely something I feel better with.

HOZIER: Ha! I think my relationship with the land is always changing with me, and as I grow older, my relationship with nature is always forming and changing, but only for the better, I have to say. And I’m very lucky that there are a lot of foxes around me and a lot of badgers around my house, so to just sort of sit and watch things happen at nature’s pace during the pandemic was really nice. And I was very fortunate that I lived in the countryside setting that I do — it’s very bucolic, and a very easy place to spend time. So over that time, I think I was — not always with intention, but sometimes with intention — connecting with the land around me, I guess, with the natural world.

HOZIER: Well, I could go off in many directions with that question. I did a Temazcal, a sweat lodge ceremony in Mexico sometime late last year, and that was a real connection with nature, in a way. But I will say that I started keeping bees. I just became a beekeeper overnight. I was gifted a beehive, and my neighbor who keeps them gave me a queen and a collection of workers, so I’ve watched as that has grown and harvested and spun the honey. And I have to say, that’s a really wonderful pastime, it’s a really wonderful thing to do because they’re surprisingly easy to take care of. But to slowly open up a hive? You have to use that smoke, and you have a little tool that helps you pry apart the frame because it’s covered in all this gluey, sticky stuff that bees use to build their hive, and it’s something that you have to be very careful with, and you have to be very slow and deliberate in your movements. And very often, without meaning to — and with the best intention in the world, like putting in some vitamins for them, something that will sort of help them — you could end up crushing a bee in just the tiniest movement. But it breeds a great deal of compassion, and it puts you in a space of having a lot of compassion for these tiny, tiny creatures that are so complicated. In some ways, they’re so simple, but in other ways, deeply, deeply complex, and so determined. In some ways, bees are just immaculately perfect.

HOZIER: Ha! Yeah. To me, it deals more with the interpersonal this album. And there are some larger macro questions, I guess, in “Eat Your Young” and “Who We Are” — there are some reflections on our socio-economic predicament. But a lot of it is just personal, and it focuses on the interpersonal, or what takes place in the internal world, with regards to love, etcetera. But yeah, I think it’s a weird time. And the title “Unreal Unearth”? When I was starting to write those songs at the top of the pandemic, it was a great time to be a conspiracy theorist with regard to misinformation and red herring narratives, and false narratives. So it was just a strange time, and also what was happening around it became so surreal, to sort of sit and watch case numbers and death tolls come in every single day. It felt very dreamlike. I felt like we’d stepped into this very surreal situation rather quickly.

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