Unreal Unearth: A Guided Tour in Hell (and Out)

By Aidan Monks

Since the stunning success of Hozier’s 2013 gospel-infused ‘Take Me to Church’, the Irish musician’s popularity has surged. From the subterranean circuit of Dublin’s open mic scene to rock station regular, and with three studio albums now under his belt, Hozier has decidedly reached headline status. 

Any artist whose first EP garners the critical, commercial, and cultural standing that Take Me to Church has usually finds their ensuing career compared exclusively with their debut. Read any critical review of a Hozier record after 2014: every riff, vocal harmony, every minute production detail exists relative to ‘Take Me to Church’, praiseworthy in relation to the power of his freshman sound. Hozier took us to the depths of religious angst, political struggle, and abuse with his self-titled debut, and then back to more of the same with his characteristic gospel-R&B-folk synthesis in Wasteland, Baby!, but what we hear in 2023’s Unreal Unearth can be viewed as both fulfilment and reinvention.

Hozier is no longer eulogising religious freedom and dignity, nor preaching the virtues of sexual expression and romantic devotion; something darker is dragging the artist beneath the surface of the world. “And sit unseen / With only the inner upheld / Your reflection can’t offer a word / To the bliss of not knowing yourself,” runs a few lines in opening track ‘De Selby (Part 1)’. The character De Selby features in The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien, a surreal Irish novel from the 1940s. Here, we have both religious and apocalyptic imagery recalling the constant themes of his discography - not to mention the literary allusions to T.S. Eliot of the second LP - but the self-destructiveness in the De Selby reference leads us somewhere thoroughly annihilative. A fictional character capable of disrupting the sequentiality of time (who incidentally does so in the name of God) holds the metaphoric forefront of the first two tracks, providing a perfectly nihilistic entry point to prefix the album’s hellish descent.

As early as ‘De Selby’, the principal theme of lost love surfaces. The echoing harmonies which underscore Hozier’s vocals unearth a sense of longing and fragmentation, particularly in refrained lines like this: “(If I fade away, let me fade away) I, I wanna fade away with you.” The deafening contrast between the slow and structured ‘(Part 1)’ and the funk-disco cut of ‘(Part 2)’ locates the essential feelings of nonchalance and impermanence to willingly enter Hell. But the similarities between the two parts, though they are fewer, are more important for understanding the album’s structure and meaning. For example, the comparison between darkness and unity which runs through ‘(Part 2)’, and manifests in romantic desire, directly builds on a motif introduced in the Gaelic outro of ‘(Part 1)’. Drawing from the writer John Moriarty, the sanctity of darkness (and his own darkness) allures the speaker beneath the earth. Unreal Unearth opens with the solemn decision to drop in on the inferno already made, in the tones of coming nightfall, and love already eclipsed.

Of all the things this record is dealing with (typical fluctuations of faith, the loneliness of COVID-19 lockdowns), it is a break-up album through and through. All nine circles of Dante’s Inferno through which listeners are toured are tainted with heartbreak, from the understated minimalism of ‘Unknown / Nth’ to the lyrical screaming match between Hozier and Brandi Carlile on ‘Damage Gets Done’. Hozier has been a practitioner of metafiction since 2019’s Wasteland, Baby!, but his literacy transcends expectations with detail as well as depth of comprehension and subversion in the uses of Dante and Milton. The former forms the album’s structural backbone where the latter shows up sparingly; one of the copious allusions in the treacherous circle’s ‘Unknown / Nth’ is to the relationship between God and Satan. Here, the Miltonian drama is framed in simpler and sentimental terms, lucidly reflecting on failed love and the incapacity for change. It makes sense that the vocally monumental bridge section of ‘Unknown / Nth’ offers a fairly summative climax to the record, and the highlight of an unimpressive D-side. 

Possibly the most Hozier-esque standard arrives in the second circle (lust): ‘Francesca’. You may have heard fans explain that Hozier writes less about love than devotion. ‘Francesca’, as much as early hits like ‘Work Song’, epitomises this statement. Hozier adopts the voice of Paolo Malatesta, the lover of Francesca da Rimini, who was murdered with her for their adultery. Dante condemns the two to endure violent winds since they were ‘swept away’ by their passions without taking responsibility for their own agency in love. In turn, Hozier musters a thunderstorm of percussion and reverberating guitars to the lovers’ defence, inverting punishment and reward (“Heaven is not fit to house a love like you and I”), and asking by what metric an act of love can be condemned: “Now that it’s done / There’s not one thing that I would change…” The sound is impressive and rebellious, but retroactive and melancholy - after all, what Paolo “would” do does not affect eternal punishment.

Unreal Unearth takes listeners from would-be devotion - which is all it is - to playful, but ironic, self-mockery in ‘Anything But’, with harrowing political commentary to befit a dystopian political landscape. Take the record’s overproduced lead single ‘Eat Your Young’ (named after a satirical essay by Jonathan Swift proposing the Irish poor sell their children as food) and the lyrically impressive ‘Butchered Tongue’. Disconsolate (self-)destruction fully predominates in cannibal imagery to describe the state of the world today. Hozier’s inferno is as much a mirror of the 21st century as it is a prismic cut-out of his own heart: situating such global and political topics as climate change, colonialism, and genocide among lovesick slow-burners like ‘Who We Are’ can partially elucidate the devastation they amass. Hell is a brutal place. 

Yet, the whirling, spiralling structure of Dante’s Inferno chaotically captured in the mid-way mix of distorted/detuned hooks and choruses from every song on the album (‘Son of Nyx’) is escaped. The underground darkness eventually sheds, and the speaker emerges having passed through every circle of punishment as if seeing sunlight for the first time. In ‘First Light’, Hozier’s tenor voice reaches, surfaces, and incants about nature, healing, and belief, renewed by the heavenly textures of the world. The song is a welcomely warm end to a tracklist of irremediable melancholy: what can you expect from an album about Hell itself? Beaming with references to gospel music, and the joy of experiencing the metamorphic effects of love, ‘First Light’ concludes Unreal Unearth by delivering listeners from the tension of previous tracks, tearing through the membrane of the earth, allowing us to breathe above the suffering down below. Hozier has drawn a portrait of himself, and his environment, in catastrophic times, in the most debilitating state of mind, culminating with that curious, optimistic question of the future. 

Take this lyric: “And I can scarce believe what I’m believin’ in / Could this be how every day begins?” The speaker is readjusting to a world in which he feels comfortable, and comforted, as if to face the sunlight at the end of a longish tunnel manufactured from his own despair. Hozier has finished with post-mortem imagery, with the lowest depths of religious malaise, bursting out of the moody nine-storey reflector of heartbreak and sin with melodious instrumentals, hymn-like gratitude, and rollicking, celebratory vocals. By ‘First Light’, Hozier has moved from death to life, agony to content, God to humanity: what the speaker is “believin’ in” is the phenomenal aspects of the living world, from colour to decay. Everything above the ground. It all looks different, better, more real now. 

Unreal Unearth is a sombre, riveting, agonising, sometimes overlong tour through all kinds of longing and damnation, which ultimately boils down to a sweepingly confident sixteen-track record. Lyrical richness and imagination offer explanatory tools for the most powerful and nonverbal experiences, which stripped back designate simple and universal feelings. Perhaps this is Hozier’s most honest record to date in which he has not just proven himself a visionary, but applied the highest poetic concept to the most personal kind of pain. Perhaps Unreal Unearth marks the beginning of a new phase in which Hozier can be viewed as a literary subversive, and lyrical virtuoso, as much as a voice for political progressivism: time will tell.