Hozier walks through hell but finds the light on Unreal Unearth
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As the pandemic raged in the summer of 2020, Irish singer-songwriter Hozier began hosting weekly poetry readings on his Instagram account. Flipping through scratchy pages — and, at times, struggling to find previously marked-up passages — he brought a sense of solace to his fans by reciting the words of Seamus Heaney, Pablo Neruda, William Butler Yeats, and Ovid. However, off screen, another writer had captivated his attention: Italian poet Dante Alighieri, whose epic Inferno (the first part of his 14th-century classic The Divine Comedy) would lay the groundwork for the musician's new album.
"I came off the road in 2019, and in mid-2020 I was writing songs that were referencing it," Hozier tells EW over Zoom from Amsterdam. "In fact, there were songs I had to let fall by the wayside because they were too specific to the text — they nodded too much to it, so it was like, okay, this was becoming musical theater in a way. There was too much narrative there."
Four years after the release of his second album, the apocalyptic Wasteland, Baby!, Hozier has returned with Unreal Unearth, his unique spin on a pandemic record. The 16-track piece chronicles recent years of both personal and global loss, heartbreak, change, and isolation through the lens of a soul-searching odyssey through Dante's notorious nine circles of hell and out the other side. Along the journey listeners will encounter a new "spirit" (or song) that corresponds to a specific circle, like "Francesca," a rollicking rock track inspired by Francesca da Rimini, a woman who was condemned to the second circle in Dante's poem for having an affair with her husband's brother.
"I just settled into a way of letting the songs be the songs they needed to be — letting them be the voices and spirits they wanted to convey — but then also trust[ing] that they fall into the themes," Hozier explains. "So once I had that, it just gave me a clear path to do the nine circle thing."
Although he deploys Dante's original text as a writing device, Hozier's ruminations on love, death, and life after death were born of very modern struggles. "It's a way that I could process some of my personal experiences in that period of the pandemic and to credit walking through a very changing time, a very challenging time for me," he says. "I think we all walked, individually, our own path through that pandemic, and we all found ourselves in very strange circumstances where things changed or we were confronted with things that weren't working for us. We lost something, whatever it is, and we came out the other side."
The first glimpse of that seismic shift can be heard on Unreal Unearth's ethereal opening track, "De Selby (Part 1)," which features Hozier singing in Irish. "Those verses in Gaelic are just about metamorphosis or shape-shifting and change, so it's [about how] in new circumstances or in darkness you're freed from a lot of things," he says. "You can no longer see yourself — all mirroring has gone from the world and in that you have the infinite, internal space to reckon with, and there's a lot of reckoning there. There's a lot of change."
It is one of several tracks on the record that reference his home country and feature him singing in its mother tongue. The Wicklow native, who was part of Irish vocal ensemble Anúna, says his knowledge of Irish history not only informs how he sees the world, but also creeps into his new work. He daydreams about floating down the River Liffey in a shopping trolley on the folksy love song "Anything But" and spills childhood secrets for staving off bitter winters on the soulful "To Someone From a Warm Climate (Uiscefhuaraithe)." However, it's on "Butchered Tongue," an ode to those who fought and died in the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and the indigenous languages lost to colonialism, that this understanding of the past takes on a much more haunting, somber note.
"It references Irish revolutionaries — as punishment, as a sort of summary execution, they were scalped with hot tar, which was ripped off in an act known as 'pitchcapping' by colonial soldiers," Hozier explains. "Obviously, on 'Eat Your Young' [the album's first single] it finds its way in too... It's hard to know where it begins and ends. Even going back to 'Take Me to Church'" — his 2013 breakthrough — "I don't think I'd ever have written a song like that if I didn't come from Ireland and the influence of the institutionalized Roman Catholic Church."
As listeners wade into the depths of Hozier's psyche, they'll also uncover the soaring acoustic ballad "I, Carrion (Icarian)," which reimagines the Greek myth of Icarus, who is so enchanted by the sun that he doesn't notice it has melted his wings and brought forth his demise. But Unreal Unearth isn't all death and gloom — Hozier also reminisces about the beauty and simplicity of youth on "Damage Gets Done," a jovial coming-of-age power ballad on which he's accompanied by Grammy-winning darling and his pal Brandi Carlile. "When I was writing that song, I could hear her voice on it," Hozier says, "and very few voices could do what Brandi could do — soar like her voice can soar."
Julia Johnson Andrew Hozier-Byrne
Then again, that feel-good track is followed by "Who We Are," a searing standout buried in the circle of anger that allows Hozier to belt out his heaviest woes. "I think that voice carries a great deal of disillusionment," he says. "It's a voice of having invested everything into some pathway, into some character that really wasn't ever there, and arriving at the point that you thought would bring you happiness and fulfillment and realizing that it… wasn't something real." He adds that the song also reflects on the "destructive elements" of ourselves that we "enact into the world while carving through the dark" — how we "act out our traumas against other people."
Darkness itself is a recurring theme, with many interpretations, on Unreal Unearth. Hozier was partly inspired by Irish writer and philosopher John Moriarty and his idea of the "beneficent darkness" — that is, the freedom and anonymity gained from sitting in a space so dark that it feels like "a night that existed before night existed." His personal interpretation of Moriarty's vision can be heard on the groovy "De Selby (Part Two)," which grapples with a darkness in which "you can't see where one person begins or where the other person ends," he explains. "It moves into the romantic space where you feel part of the same whole. In that way it's positive. But I think in other parts — in the descent into places like 'Who We Are' — the darkness is something that's desperate and suffocating."
The first step toward the light, ironically, can be heard in the cinematic triumph "Son of Nyx." The moving instrumental's title is not only a reference to Nyx, the Greek goddess of night, and her son Charon, who ferries newly deceased souls across the rivers Styx and Acheron, but a tribute to the late father of Hozier's close friend and bass player, Alex Ryan.
"He sent me a voice memo with him just sitting at a piano and playing this beautiful piece," Hozier says. "what you're hearing is literally just the voice memo." Ryan sent him the note shortly after his father's death. "Alex's father's name was Nick. So Alex, then, being a son of Nick, is a reference there, too, to honor his father. When I first heard it, I just thought it was staggeringly beautiful." He adds that as its plush orchestrations blossom in their ears, keen-eared listeners will catch callbacks to various hooks, choruses, and lines from the record — "all these different circles, all these little other voices sort of spinning around in that space."
Unreal Unearth culminates with "First Light," a swirling hymn meant to conjure the feeling of being cleansed by the sun. "It's about coming out the other side and having a new relationship with light as something you don't want to hide from, or disappear from," Hozier says. "It's something you can celebrate — as if you're seeing it for the first time — for its brilliance, as opposed to something that is blinding."
That feeling of hard-earned renewal has left him so inspired that Hozier says he has "eight or 10 songs" he's hoping will "find their way to people" sometime next year. "We have way more," he teases, "so it's about how we find a way to share this."
With those first steps into the light, then, comes a new beginning, in his life and in his art.
Unreal Unearth is out now.
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