Watching Glastonbury from my sofa this summer, I was surprised – for the most part – not to find myself overwhelmed with Fomo. I had access to a shower on a sticky summer weekend! I wasn’t surviving off chips! I hadn’t – as I did in around 2018 – chucked so much glitter on my parting that I was picking it off my scalp weeks later. I was quite content watching the weekend unfold on BBC iPlayer – that was, until Hozier’s surprise set, when I was suddenly overcome with not only Fomo but alsoa burning desire to actually be Hozier.
If only I had stuck with any of the musical instruments I had taken up and abandoned as a child, or been born in County Wicklow, or, er, just been born as Andrew Hozier Byrne and not as myself. I too could be delivering a spiritual experience to the masses, in my trusty denim jacket, looking like I booked Glastonbury at 12 and a Just Stop Oil protest at 2.
Hozier is decidedly not at the bleeding edge of pop, or rock, or wherever those two genres meet. In fact, when I told someone who was at Glastonbury that he was one of my favourite acts I’d watched that weekend, they pulled a weird face and asked me why, in the same way that I once asked someone why they had gone to a festival specifically to see Steps.
But, for me at least, he is undeniably brilliant. I challenge anyone not to burst into song while listening to Take Me to Church (triple platinum; an LGBT+ anthem; even sounds good on the subway), or the Nina Simone-inspired Nina Cried Power. His inspiration is broad, too; songs like Someone New tap into the power of fleeting infatuation, while tracks from his new album, Unreal Unearth, take inspiration from Greek myth and Dante’s Divine Comedy and the hell of heartache. In the wrong hands, it could all be a bit sixth form poetry but in Hozier’s, it is simply poetry, complete with a YouTube lecture in which he perfectly plays the role of a world-weary English graduate on the brink of quitting Teach First.
With Unreal Unearth – released next week – he is unafraid to make the album that he wants to make. Son of Nyx is all swelling, John Grant-esque instrumental melodies, courtesy of Budapest Festival Orchestra; there’s a track called Abstract (Psychopomp); he sings in both English and Irish; at least two of the songs made me cry. Just when you think you might be in for something that could vaguely be described as easygoing or ethereal, he pulls you in with another gutpunch of a lyric (see Unknown Nth: “You know the distance never made a difference to me/I swam a lake of fire, I’d have walked across the floor of any sea”, or Francesca: “My life was a storm, since I was born/How could I fear any hurricane?”).
All of this works, of course, because Hozier has amazing pipes that make everything sound like some kind of ancient secret. It helps that he seems to absolutely hate being in the public eye (he recently described fame as an “unnatural state”). Turn up the attention-hungry dial a little more, make the melodies a little more cloying – and you’d have something that feels like parody. But in this sweet spot – where the odd album track that sounds a little like Starsailor isn’t a crime punishable by cancellation – it all hangs together perfectly.
You may consider Hozier to be only marginally on the right side of “Radio 2 summer playlist” territory. But, like Steps, underestimate him at your peril.
• Unearth Unreal is released on 18 August
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