Hozier: Unaired
★★★★☆
Andrew Hozier-Byrne, the cloudbusting balladeer behind Take Me to Church, has raised an unholy ruckus over the past 12 months. His third album, Unreal Unearth, was his best to date, his anthemic songwriting rebooted with an unsettling folk-horror sensibility and sideways nods to Flann O’Brien’s Father Ted fever dream The Third Policeman. (The LP’s baroque barnstormers De Selby parts one and two are named after the book’s mad-philosopher character.)
Then, in March this year, he put out the Unheard EP, cut from the same recording sessions and fronted by the rootsy juggernaut Too Sweet, a laid-back epic that took a life of its own when it went to number one in the United States. Now he rounds off a busy summer on the road with an excellent new three-track EP, Unaired, again taken from the Unreal Unearth recordings and opening with the shiver-inducing stomper Nobody’s Soldier.
Hozier is generally at his most interesting when he thinks big – and Nobody’s Soldier has an irresistible tectonic quality, his expressive howl paired with a rumbling blues guitar line.
It’s a gripping cacophony that takes up the themes in Unreal Unearth, which portrayed nature as a brooding, unknowable force at the horizons of human understanding. “If I tell you this is drowning,” he sings ominously, “you’ll tell me I’m walking on water”.
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The singer has explained that the song is a gut response to the horrors unfolding across the world – wars, intolerance, social-media insanity. These are subjects he has talked about on the road, where he has finished performances with a call for a ceasefire in Gaza – a money-where-your-mouth-is gesture that many artists at his level refuse to take (to their shame).
True to that billing, Nobody’s Soldier searingly captures the dread bound up in so much of modern existence – a sense of trepidation rising through the music before he reaches the chorus, declaring, “Honey, I’m taking no ordеrs / Gonna be nobody’s soldier.”
Unaired contains two other songs, each effective counterpoints to the scale and sweep of Nobody’s Soldier. July is a sweet slice of blues pop, while That You Are, a duet with the Syrian-American musician Bedouine, is agreeably minimalist, rising like smoke on the wind.
What’s apparent throughout is that Hozier, for all the heaviness of the material, is having fun. All three tracks on Unaired ripple with mischief and wit – qualities that were likewise to the fore of Too Sweet and that confirm the 2024 version of Hozier as perhaps the most interesting yet.
Unaired is released on Friday, August 16th
