Album Review: Hozier, ‘Unreal Unearth’

Much has been written about the pandemic and its innumerable ramifications on our attention spans, our capacity to feel and love, and our individual and collective understandings of what it means to move through the world as a human being. That period of isolation, and the subsequent period of searching for some semblance of normalcy, resulted in a canon of albums that tasked themselves and their audiences with parsing through those aforementioned musings. When it comes to Irish rocker Hozier, however, these are stories he’s been exploring for over a decade.

This year marks the 10-year anniversary of “Take Me To Church,” the rousing debut single that launched Hozier to global superstardom. Two formidable studio albums followed with comparatively humbler commercial returns — although both records boasted an increasingly broader and multilayered artistic vision. Naturally, Hozier’s innate ability and concerted effort to create songs that simultaneously work on the level of multiple, sometimes conflicting narratives, resulted in his most recent studio effort: the outstanding Unreal Unearth.

On his third studio album, Hozier implodes the religion-infused lyricism of his debut single with the implementation of classic literature and uncomfortably intense introspection. Primarily informed by Dante’s Inferno, with flashes of Greek mythology interspersed throughout, Unreal Unearth finds Hozier primarily concerned with the grey, liminal spaces of human existence that were shoved to the forefront of everybody’s mind at the turn of the decade. While Hozier has always erred on the side of the literary and displayed a penchant for life’s undefinable spaces, Unreal Unearth is particularly devastating. The album never reaches the hamminess of true melodrama, but there’s a feeling of borderline insurmountable loss and grief that permeates the hourlong record. One reading of the album’s lyrics very obviously points towards the demise of some kind of romantic relationship, but it’s not just the dissolution of that particular dynamic that anchors the record. In his musical expansion of Inferno, Hozier grapples with no longer believing in the concept of love itself and the value of the phenomenon in a life that gets bleaker by the day due to various compounding societal, political, and environmental pressures.

The stakes are high on Unreal Unearth, perhaps higher than on both of Hozier’s previous albums. A three-song EP titled Eat Your Young preceded the album, but Hozier made sure to note that the tracks were “not representative of the entire album”. And he was correct to do so. With an, at times, overly ambitious concept and more collaborators and co-writers than ever before, Unreal Unearth is an admirable, if not terrifying, undertaking — and, for the most part, Hozier comes out victorious.

Rubyworks / Island / Columbia

Despite its clear tonal and conceptual shifts from the rest of his catalog, Unreal Unearth is still a seamless fit because of the way Hozier structures the album’s steady swell. While it’s not exactly a slow burn, the journey from the intimacy of album opener “De Selby (Part 1)” to album closer “First Light” is one that simultaneously characterizes Dante’s odyssey through Hell and Hozier’s ability to reclaim some zest for life after wallowing in the depths of its most harrowing greys. Inspired by a fictional philosopher who is unaware that he’s dead and in the afterlife — from Flann O'Brien’s The Third Policeman — “De Selby (Part 1)” relishes the quietest moments before the dawn of life, the seconds of darkness that cover you upon your arrival on the planet before you are thrust into the light. The light in question being the funkier “De Selby (Part 2),” which trades the gentle, acoustic Gaelic musings of its predecessor for rollicking guitars and cavalier vocal flourishes. Just as he established with “Church” ten years ago, Hozier’s approach to singing is highly intentional, yet it always feels like he’s pulling notes out of thin air — and they always comprise the most heartbreaking melody to contour his despondent lyrics. “I wanna run against the world that's turnin' I'd movе so fast that I'd outpace the dawn,” he sings, always taking the chance to cement his commitment to resistance — intransigence born out of his allegiance to love in spite of what the world around him has to say about it.

The double-header of both “De Selby” tracks bears several Easter eggs for the remainder of Hozier’s efforts to unearth the un-realities of life in this particular timeline. He sings in Gaelic at the end of Part 1, setting the stage for “Butchered Tongue,” the album’s strongest song, and not-so-coincidentally, one of the record’s few self-penned tracks. On “Butchered Tongue,” Hozier returns to the more overtly political lane he traversed with “Eat Your Young,” Unreal Unearth’s lead single. Over plaintive strings, Hozier’s voice barely rises above a whisper as he recounts Britain’s violent efforts to stamp out the Irish tongue and culture. In the context of Unreal Unearth, “Butchered Tongue” soundtracks the seventh circle of Hell — the outer ring of the Circle of Violence where those who commit violence against others and their property are condemned to eternal submergence in boiling blood. Again, a twinkling air of resistance anchors the songs on this album, “With no translator left to sound / A butchered tongue still singin' here above the ground,” he softly coos. The funkiness of “De Selby (Part 2)” also previews the sound of “Francesca,” a track written from the perspective of the Inferno character of the same name that champions the irresistible allure of lust. “How could you think, darlin', I'd scare so easily? / Now that it's done / There's not one thing that I would change / My life was a storm since I was born / How could I fear any hurricane?” he asks.

As enrapturing as Unreal Unearth is, sometimes Hozier’s vision gets muddled in his hodgepodge of literary references. “I, Carrion (Icarian)” messily combines the myths of Icarus and Atlas as the track attempts to capture those fleeting moments of ecstasy and reckless abandon before shit hits the fan. There’s also “Damage Gets Done,” a frustratingly glossy Brandi Carlile duet that trades any glimpse of grit for radio-ready sheen. From its bombastic hook to the song’s overarching protection of teenagers from the misplaced blame of entitled adults, “Damage Gets Done” is good, but it’s almost too aware of what it’s trying to sell.

Of course, Hozier balances these less impressive moments with some of the most gorgeous songs of the year. “First Time” and “To Someone from a Warm Climate (Uiscefhuaraithe)” pair well as two songs that trace the evolution of romance by zeroing in on the most intricate moments of intimacy between two people who shared something bigger and brighter than the sun itself. Hozier’s singular ability to build the most cutting reflections on maturation and love out of concepts as simple as the flippancy of a warm bed to someone from a warmer climate never loses its magic. There’s also “Son of Nyx,” an instrumental interlude that most effortlessly blends the personal and the literary in a way that evaded some of the album’s other tracks.

When Hozier does consciously play into plodding musical tropes, his attention to detail elsewhere actually makes it work. Take his interpolation of gospel choirs and swelling key changes across standouts “All Things End” and “First Light.” Admittedly, the production choices are quite on-the-nose and predictable, but in the context of an album so explicitly concerned with translating Christian mythology and iconography into the terrors of human existence in the 2020s, they absolutely achieve the catharsis that they’re so clearly aiming for. It’s the boundlessness of Hozier's voice that allows him to pull off such ambitious projects — from the cerebral “Abstract” to the decade-traversing highlight “Unknown / Nth.”

Unreal Unearth is not a perfect album, by any means, but it carries an air of fearlessness and commitment that only Hozier could bring. Ten years removed from his explosive debut, Hozier stands as one of the strongest songwriters and storytellers of his generation — and Unreal Unearth feels like the beginning of a new level of creative richness for an artist with innumerable stories to tell.

Key Tracks: “De Selby (Part 1)” | “Eat Your Young” | “All Things End” | “Unknown / Nth” | “Butchered Tongue” | “To Someone from a Warm Climate (Uiscefhuaraithe)”

Score: 88