As the sky fades from orange to pink over Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, New York, in early June, 13,000 people stand, enraptured by Hozier’s presence. When the Irish singer-songwriter motions for them to sing, they comply. When he moves through the crowd to reach the B stage, everyone follows his towering six-foot-five-inch figure. It’s the first of his four sold-out shows here, and he opens it with “Too Sweet,” the ubiquitous hit that topped the Billboard Hot 100 three weeks after it came out in March and became the musician’s highest charting entry since he first broke through with the gospel-infused anomaly “Take Me to Church” in 2014.
Lots of artists would have saved their most indulgent pop anthem for an encore. But Hozier hooks the crowd from the start. There’s an unraveling that occurs: Bodies bounce along to the thudding bass line, hands reach up toward the heavens. The fans lining the front barricade waited hours to be this close to him. Some brought signs, like the one he reposts on his Instagram later, that reads “Lesbians ♥️ Hozier.” One young Black woman in the front wears a black-and-white keffiyeh, a prominent symbol of Palestinian resistance.
There’s a sense among Hozier’s audience that he represents a type of idealized man. His striking height and cascading hair make him seem like a romance novel’s leading man come to life; his pointed 10-minute-long onstage speeches calling for the protection of human rights reflect a rare sense of intelligence and compassion in pop culture. But Hozier didn’t become pop’s prophet of his own accord. It just sort of happened, and even he was slightly perplexed when it did.
“I didn’t think that I’d done anything to warrant it,” Hozier says on a rainy afternoon in New York over black tea and grain bowls at the Mediterranean restaurant Iris. “I try to keep myself at a safe enough distance from it,” he continues. “That’s more just to make sure that when I have to come back to me — to resourcing some creative space where I can check in with myself — I don’t have expectations of stuff that hasn’t come from me.”
Hozier grew up in a seaside town in eastern Ireland’s County Wicklow, penning songs as a teenager and learning to shape his philosophical musings into melodies. He goes home whenever he gets the chance; it helps him remain himself. His constants are all there: his bees, for example; he got a beehive from his parents, and his close friend “Beekeeper” Quincy texts regular bee updates while Hozier is on tour. Plus there’s a tight-knit crew of friends from his childhood and teenage years, too.
He has core memories of discovering music with them when they were kids, switching between VH1 and Kerrang. “That was your day after school, just talking crap and watching terrestrial television,” he remembers fondly. “It was so exciting.” Their interests are just as wholesome now. As the best man in a friend’s upcoming wedding, Hozier has been tasked with organizing the bachelor party. “It’s gonna be pretty tame,” he predicts. “Just dudes hanging out. The groom in question is big into swimming in the sea, so we’re heading out to do some water-based cliff jumping and stuff like that.”
When he’s on tour, Hozier often misses being able to wake up and make breakfast in the morning. He misses easy access to the richest milk and cream from Ireland and honey from his bees. Having little more than maybe a toaster on a tour bus is less than ideal for preparing a meal, but then again, so is the lack of solitude. Hozier loves cooking, but he isn’t the kind of chef who enjoys a crowded kitchen. “I think I would like help cleaning up or keeping things tidy, but honestly, I find myself getting really agitated,” he admits. “It’s the control freak in me — which would be the same in the studio. Like, ‘That’s not quite right, try it this way.’ If somebody chops the carrots in the wrong way, that’s not gonna work with the dish. I don’t know why, but it’s so particular.”
There’s a quiet stillness to daily life in the countryside by the sea that contrasts with his life on the road. “It’s the feeling of not being reachable,” Hozier explains. “The feeling of not needing to be anywhere or do anything.” After the success of “Take Me to Church,” he kept releasing music, including Wasteland, Baby!, his 2019 album. His career has picked up even more; he hasn’t spent more than three or four weeks at home since 2023’s Unreal Unearth. At 34, he’s slipped back into the grind of performance and promotion, chipping away at a schedule of nearly 200 sold-out shows. Still, he’s thoughtful and grounded during this hectic time, even as he reflexively runs his hands through his hair.
In a few hours, we’ll head to The Late Show With Stephen Colbert for his first televised performance of “Too Sweet.” Hozier lets out a bellowing laugh, remembering how the now double-platinum-certified record collected dust for a while. He almost didn’t release it; he’d recorded the upbeat track while making Unreal Unearth but ultimately left it off the album. “Maybe it’s the pessimist in me,” he says. “I was like, ‘People don’t want to hear this stuff, we’ll just put it away.’ ” He couldn’t have been more wrong. The single came out on the Unheard EP, alongside three other vaulted recordings.
Even more unreleased material appears on the three-track Unaired EP, which arrives on Aug. 16. “There was a little bit more elbow grease and a little bit more sweat put into the second EP, just because those songs weren’t fully realized,” Hozier explains. He hadn’t looked at some songs in more than a year. The first single, “Nobody’s Soldier,” was a loose concept before he turned it into a blaring funk-rock record about the trap of ethical consumption. “ ‘Too Sweet’ is one of the most lighthearted, fun songs that I’ve ever put out,” Hozier says. “So part of me was like, ‘Well, I better follow this up with an anti-war song.’”
When he first started writing Unreal Unearth in during the pandemic, he remembers, “I’d spent like two years on my own and I was sick of my own company.” He went to Los Angeles to fill the space, making plans to hang with Daniel Tennenbaum (or Bekon), the hip-hop producer best known for his work with Kendrick Lamar. “I thought I was gonna meet him for a cup of coffee — and then I end up in a room with a bunch of guys and he puts a mic in my hand,” Hozier remembers. He had never been in this type of spontaneous jam session before. It sparked something in him. “It was unburdened with too much consideration,” he continues. “Unburdened from the need for this to be the thing.”
Hozier has a litmus test for keeping his artistic integrity intact: “Does it move me or not? Is it something that I feel is urgent to me, and it feels worth writing?” If ever the answer is no, his response is simple: “Let somebody else do it.” He knows that if he sits down with a guitar and puts pen to paper, he can write a song — and a damn good one, at that. But that alone isn’t what guides him. “For me, what seemed like an intolerable path to tread after ‘Church’ and my second record was, like, I don’t want to change my shape, my intentions, and my approach to the work — and to myself — based on what is perceived to be a charting hit,” he says. He’s notoriously discreet about his personal life and doesn’t want his songs to feel like “a journal entry, or a work that trades off on some intrigue into my private life.”
Listening back to the songs he penned in his early twenties, Hozier says he’s “quite stricken by how vulnerable it was or how straight up it was.” He points to “Foreigner’s God,” a deep cut from his self-titled debut album, in particular. The record was crucial in shaping his understanding of the ways women’s trauma can present itself in intimate spaces. It’s not a topic he would avoid now, but his approach would be less direct. “I probably have more [emotional] access to the actual experience of how painful that is now,” Hozier considers, but questions: “Would I put the same thing to paper now? I’d find another way around it.”
Hozier’s music often tells stories through fictional characters to maintain a sense of distance. He deploys this tactic with “That You Are,” a tender ballad from Unaired, written and recorded with the Syrian American musician Bedouine. Delivered over soul-stirring violins, the lyrics interpret poet Dante Alighieri’s infatuation with his muse, Beatrice — a woman he only actually met once or twice, but placed on a pedestal of divine beauty and perfection. “July,” another honeyed entry on Unaired, shares that same sense of worship. “Something that I had hoped that the songs could play with and reflect is — when bringing it back to Dante’s Inferno — all of these ghosts that this character meets,” he says. “Every chapter is a different character voicing their pain, their suffering, whatever it is. They’re speaking to him about the life that they lived.”
For some fraction of his audience of millions, Hozier is a version of Beatrice. They treat his words like scripture and worship at the altar of who they perceive him to be. He kind of understands it. “We find a mirage oasis in the desert in the world around us all the time,” he says, philosophizing about the projections around his stardom. Strip away his imaginative theorizing and it could just be that people are searching for something that feels passionate, and they found it within him. “The way that things — even romantic interactions — are oftentimes presented or marketed to us, it’s like everything is something to be consumed,” Hozier adds. “How does one make sense of their own human experience, when some form of that human experience has been distilled, or reduced, and then sold back to you all the time? For me, the instinct is always to sidestep that and try to find something that hasn’t been sold to you.”
Hozier lights up when he’s reciting the teachings of his favorite poets or discussing history and humanity. “I’m not a poet,” he says. “But I would love to study poetry.” In another world, a version of himself attends lectures that reward him for nerding out. In this one, part of him still lingers on his decision to drop out of Trinity College in Dublin. He briefly studied music in his twenties, but felt he could excel more on his own. “Looking at it now, I think poetry is something that I could probably put my focus into — and be hungry for — if I got rid of all other distractions,” he says. “I’ve thought about it for a long time.”
Going back would require Hozier to take a real break. But he feels a certain pressure to be productive right now. He’s drawn inspiration from his shows and the artists he’s met on the festival circuit. In June, he performed “Work Song” with Ed Sheeran at the Netherlands’ Pinkpop Festival. “He showed up and he already knew it on guitar, he already knew the lyrics. The man eats, sleeps, and breathes music,” Hozier remembers. Before Unaired, Hozier hadn’t spent much time making music while on tour. “It’s been nice to get this little drug hit of ‘Oh, my God, a new thing — something that hasn’t been finished yet,” he says. He’s committed to chasing that buzz.
When we catch up over Zoom a few weeks later, he’s backstage at England’s Lytham Festival, spilling more musings on Dante and thinking about the few days he’ll soon have at home. “I just hope to do as little as possible,” Hozier says. “The more time I spend on a couch, the happier I’ll be.” He’ll catch up with the same friends, the waves of the seaside will crash all the same, and it’ll be like he never left: “My neighbor was just texting me about the beehives.”
From Rolling Stone US
