Hell, at Least According to Hozier, Never Sounded Sweeter

“When you’re in your twenties, you want to burn up in the atmosphere quick, in some glorious way,” Andrew Hozier-Byrne tells me right before St. Patrick’s Day, which coincidentally is also his 33rd birthday. So, I ask, Is it true? Are your thirties actually better?

“I will say it is, and I always scarcely believed that,” he admits, raking a hand through his trademark leonine tangle. “I used to think it was just people surrendering something. But what you’re giving up on—it was something that was conceptual and impossible anyway.” From our perch at Union Square Cafe, we pause to watch flurries blowing horizontally outside, and I’m unsure if ever a more exquisite version of hygge could exist beyond the experience of drinking tea and pondering the passage of time with the Irish singer-songwriter mononymously known as Hozier. 

By the time you’re reading this, Hozier will be celebrating his big day with the release of his new EP, Eat Your Young, capping off a whole (!) decade since that telltale bellow that first infiltrated international airwaves via the diamond-certified hit “Take Me To Church” and kicking off a plentiful year ahead: with a third studio album on the way, plus a headlining tour and crop of festival stops, the soulful six-foot-sixer is just getting started with what we might term, given the last few years, as both his and our post-apocalyptic era.

True, it almost didn’t happen: “I thought I was going to have to retire,” Hozier says of his own bout of pandemic-fueled existentialism brought on by strict lockdown at his home in County Wicklow and the resulting solitude. “I thought I’d never write another song … every idea I had been working on up until that point, it just felt like the world changed, and things became life and death very quickly.” As much as his career has been defined by singing out societal concerns—recall that “Take Me to Church” criticized the Catholic institution (not that it prevented the Vatican from apparently inquiring unsuccessfully, at one point, for Hozier to come perform it: “The song obviously was taken on face value by a lot of people,” he adds dryly)—and as vividly as his last album, Wasteland, Baby!, ruminated on the idea of armageddon, that particular state of the world made him feel more like crumbling than making music. 

Guilt over such floundering didn’t help, either: “There was some rhetoric from influencers and certain business people being like, You know, if you’re not productive in this moment, what are you good for?” he recalls. “It was just incredible, like we’re really past the point of pretending anymore that we don’t value anything of ourselves other than our productivity.” Here, a further glimpse of the personal politics that Hozier, who was raised as a Quaker, has always made clear as day, whether he’s giving himself over to lunchtime sidebars on capitalization and concentrated private power—“Sorry for ranting,” he says sheepishly more than once—or releasing a new, Mona Eltahawy-inspired song in support of American women living in a post-Roe reality as was the case last fall. I ask how it works, this duty of being a modern-day protest artist in the age of Twitter. “It is impossible to rise to all atrocity and hold space,” he says finally. “You can’t always get it right.” 

In his new music, Hozier grapples with this tension of struggle, versus surrender, in the face of a deluge with the help of a few canonical references. The forthcoming late summer album, Unreal Unearth, is thematically arranged according to the nine circles of hell in Dante’s Inferno; on the EP—the album’s “sampler platter”—you get a taste of circle three (“Eat Your Young”) and six (“All Things End”). The track “Through Me (The Flood)” draws specifically from the passage where Beatrice comes in to help, which he swears is a scene that’s as funny as it is lyrical. “But do you not see?” My lunch companion recalls, “Do you not hear one to rise above the common crowd for you? Do you not see how he is assailed by a flood of death no ocean on earth can boast the power to surpass?" He remembers feeling preoccupied, too, by the flood imagery in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: “It’s sort of surreal, he talks about how dolphins are swimming through trees as a baffled tiger swims above a farmyard—this weird idea of like, an old world rests below a new world,” he explains dreamily, spidering his hands out on the white tablecloth as if we’re plotting a siege. So, yes, while you were off unsuccessfully bread-making and Netflix-bingeing, Hozier got really into epic poetry. 

For Hozier’s most online legion of fans, who have elected him resident “forest king” and “bog god,” the potent combo of his lyricism and a mild-mannered persona that’s prone to earnestly reading aloud on IG Live, or posting about how much he wept watching Aftersun on the plane (“It was devastating!” he insists) has cracked the code for a hyperbolically wholesome devotion. On social media, the idea of Hozier hovers some place between celebrity and meme, a beacon of nontoxic masculinity and ancient mystical being (which, on the internet, might be one and the same); there’s a comment on a popular 2020 video of one of his acapella performances where someone wrote, “This is what I hear in the wind when I’m walking in a forest at night beckoning me to go deeper into the trees and I do.” A whole TikTok theory exists about the uncanny sonic similarities between him and Dolly Parton. And, I regret to inform you, he sees it all. 

“It’s kind of an impossible situation,” he says with a laugh. “Sometimes I feel quite seen when I’m sort of getting roasted in a gentle, nice way—that nightcap and gown and candle, living in a spooky Victorian mansion type of thing.” Other times, the parasocial ardor and cottage core obsession does overwhelm, but Hozier has at least figured out what his more posting-disease-afflicted peers in the industry haven’t, which is to let a little sense of mystery work for you. “If I keep a sense of distance on social media, it’s not to maintain that sort of mystique, it’s just better for my mental health,” he says. “But I do enjoy what people plant in that negative space.”

But it’s not all in our head: Before we go, I want to press once more at this whole poetry-lover bit, so I ask for a reading recommendation. But this being a man professionally, perhaps metaphysically foresworn to the audio experience, Hozier pulls up the Poetry Unbound podcast page on his phone and tells me about a Robert Pinsky quote he loves about how poetry’s real medium is not the page. “I think that’s a beautiful thought, that the actual body and the throat and the mouth and the lungs are the medium of the poet’s work,” he muses. I’m instructed to start with “My Mother’s Body,” by Marie Howe. “I hope you’ll enjoy it. You can sit in the bath with it and just listen,” Hozier adds before disappearing out into the snow.