Andrew John Hozier-Byrne’s third studio album, Unreal Unearth, released on the August 18, 2023, features him writing and singing lyrics in Irish for the first time. In an interview with The Irish Times, he said, “There’s so much that cannot be expressed outside of that language, language can express that which we’re unaware of.” The concept of the album revolves around the Nine Circles of Hell, drawing direct inspiration from Dante’s Inferno, a classic novel. In Inferno, a man finds his way into new circumstances, walks through this dark space, and comes to the other side of the world to see the sky, the brightness in it, for the first time after a long period.
Hozier’s journey starts at the gates of Hell. One of the main themes of Inferno is darkness, and the first two songs of Hozier’s album are embodiments of the same. “The likes of a darkness so deep that God at the start couldn’t bear.” – The lyrics mention the idea of this darkness that he finds himself in being a “new space,” suggesting that Hozier is being introduced to the feeling of Inferno through the relationship he’s singing about, and so we begin the descent. Hozier, however, does not view the darkness in his lover’s heart as something deceitful; he sees it as something more to know his lover by, something more to love. For me, the macabre is realized in Hozier’s peril. The treacherous, the unheard, the things not to be mentioned are given voice in the words he adorns his lover with.
In the track “First Time,” Hozier, speaking from Limbo (the First Circle of Hell), seems to be talking about meeting this person who has completely wiped his slate clean. He cannot fathom his life before them. It’s almost as if he is gaining the idea of life in this person. “The first time that you kissed me, I drank dry the river Lethe” (The river Lethe in the underworld makes anyone who has drunk from it forget everything they know).
The track “Francesca” is about the circle of lust. Hozier sings from Francesca’s perspective, a woman who had an affair and fell in love with her husband’s brother, Paolo. Upon discovery, she was killed by her husband. In Inferno, Francesca and Paolo stay together even in death, and this image is kind of marked into you as Hozier sings, “Heaven is not fit to house a love like you and me.”
There is a madness in this album. When you open yourself up, you are drawn into the grief. The dark gives way to the light, and the light gives way to the dark. Every experience leads you to the next. It is a mural made of the bewildering and nightmarish experience of existence. The ceaselessness of suffering, which never seems to stop, the unending grief you are exposed to as a consequence of being alive, and the human spirit, which is frail and fraught with worries but lives on. You persist, and somehow you always live on.
The track “Damage Gets Done”, is about greed within the changing world. It’s about growing up and losing the naivety and innocence you once had, no longer able to ignore the burden of politics and money. You need greed to survive in this world. Greed is all that you have, all that you can carry after some time. Innocent existence is an impossible thing. “I don’t know when the feeling ended, but I know being reckless and young is not how the damage gets done.” The feeling of growing up summed in one line for me.
Hozier sings about love fading, and the feeling of how you get to enjoy love in your childhood also fades. He and his love miss that but they know the fault does not lie in them. The world simply writes it off you. Page by page in your book, you stop daydreaming. And then all at once one day, before you realize, time’s long gone and memories have faded, your innocence is ruined, and your childhood is a long way down the road. You find yourself overwhelmed by adult responsibilities before you even have the time to spare one last laugh with your friends at the playground.
In the track “Who We Are” Hozier sings, “We’re born at night, so much of our lives is just carving through the dark to get so far.” Often we lose ourselves when we step into adulthood, we lose sight of what we want at times, even who we are or want to be, we lose ourselves to the endless spiral of dreams. Hozier seems to sing to this morbidness of life with anger in his heart, “We sacrificed, we gave our time to something undefined”, and “Chasing someone else’s dream…”
In the track “All Things End”, Hozier then talks about the ephemeral nature of all things, particularly romance. “When people say that something is forever, either way, it ends.” But just because something will have an end doesn’t mean that it cannot hold any meaning. Meaning exists beyond the end. We live only once, only for ourselves. We must never limit ourselves, especially when it comes to love.
The track “Butchered Tongue” is incredible. It is a commentary on the act of violence itself. Hozier speaks of how places and cultures have been lost to the brutality of man. He mourns cultures whose languages and identities have been suppressed for centuries under oppressive regimes. He mourns for a time when such violence did not exist. Yet he finds solace. He revels in the magic of seeing a language and culture survive and thrive in defiance of this brutality. Hozier sings about the preservation of native language in the face of violence, feeling estranged from our culture but still remembering the shape of our ancestors’ language on one’s tongue. The song exists “Between what is lost forever and what can still be known.”
The fifteenth track of the album, “Unknown/Nth” is about the Ninth Circle of Hell, treachery. Throughout Inferno, the deeper we descend, a soft breeze becomes a strong wind that, when we reach the center, we find is coming from the violent flapping of Lucifer’s wings. Hozier sings of this center. The closer you get to the center of the lake of treachery, the more it solidifies and soon, you find yourself plastered, frozen in ice. The song itself is about betrayal and its hidden depths. Knowing someone in their entirety, all their good and bad parts requires a lot of courage. You think you have learned from your past heartbreaks and failures, but it happens again.
In this life, to trust is to give your heart; once you do, there is always the possibility of it being broken. None of us are angels. We are all going to break someone else’s heart or hurt another person in this life. We are as likely to be the victims as we are the perpetrators. Do you know, I could break beneath the weight of the goodness and love I still carry for you? That I’d walk so far just to take the injury of finally knowing you? And Hozier would do it again and again, fall in love again and again, to be betrayed because he knows nothing to be guaranteed. It’s devastating,” he says in an interview, “I was channeling that feeling of coming out the far side of such admiration and worship, and that feeling of being let down and having your expectations dashed. We betray ourselves in the act of opening up to somebody and believing so much,” Hozier says, “Our eyes betray us, our hearts betray us, our minds betray us. And that’s the ‘Nth’ reference: we open ourselves up to something, only to betray ourselves…”
Hozier is writing about the absolute worst humanity has to offer, all our sins and crimes laid bare, all that brands us human. And all of it makes us complex in the most beautiful ways. We are stricken down by tragedies. We survive despite it all. The valiant effort of being human is beautiful. How we persist and strive forward and begin again. There is no limit to love and only inevitable heartbreaks to swallow. So, we must live on. For we were given this life, and so we must live on. If the world won’t give you a place, you must carve one. Do it fiercely and lovingly, with all the kindness you can think to give. His weak heartbeat still follows him out of his relationship that has ended, but Hozier now begins his ascent, and with each consecutive step he takes toward healing, he lets go of the pain that is not serving him anymore. The journey through Hell has come to an end. He is facing sunlight again. He realizes that prolonging suffering is crueler than just letting love die, and so he lets his love die in that relationship because now he must live. “After this, I’m never going to be the same, and I am never going back again.”