Inside Hozier's 'Unreal Unearth': How The Singer Flipped Dante's ...

Like many, Hozier used his lockdown time to dive into some literature. Little did he know, it would inspire his third album.

In Unreal Unearth, which arrived Aug. 18, Hozier muses about his pandemic experience through the lens of Dante Alighieri's famous poem Inferno. Part one of the 14th-century epic Divine Comedy, the poem narrates Dante's journey through Hell and its depicted nine circles — an eerily brilliant framework for an album.

"I didn't want to write songs that were about a lockdown; I didn't want to write songs that were about the pandemic," Hozier tells GRAMMY.com. "But I did want to explore — or at least acknowledge, even as a nod structurally — this feeling of going into something, these new circumstances and experiences in that time and coming out the other side of it." 

Born Andrew Hozier-Byrne, Hozier has always been an artist with an intellectual approach; he referenced Irish poet Seamus Heaney on his second album, 2019's Wasteland, Baby!, and Biblical and Celtic contexts on his 2014 self-titled debut.

But Unreal Unearth felt different for him. "[There's] a more announced intention of a thread in the structure," he says, adding that he tapped into two new territories: collaboration and deeper plumbing of his Irish roots.

The trio of facets helped Hozier create an album that fits right in with the deeply thoughtful lyricism and beautifully layered soundscapes of his previous releases, but with a sense of reinvigoration. Its journey from the darkness of opening track "De Selby (Part 1)" to the breakthrough of closer "First Light" creates a captivating tale that only a voice like Hozier's could narrate.

Below, hear from Hozier about three of his biggest inspirations for Unreal Unearth, and how it all resulted in a project that opened a new creative door for the Irish star.

There was some old poetry — and I mean, like, old, classic poetry — that, as a lyricist, I always wanted to explore. Then the pandemic happened, and offered so much free time. I was working on other songs [at the time], and I put a lot of those ideas aside.

In March 2020, it felt like the world changed, and priorities changed, and my priorities changed with it. And there was some lines in [Inferno] that resonated with me at the time. It just felt like there was a great deal of potential loss hanging in the air.

Early in that poem [is] that sort of famous quote that Dante imagines is written over the door of hell — you know, that "Abandon all hope" line. There's a larger passage that says "through me, you enter into the population of loss."

As a structure, I did want to acknowledge something in my experiences of [that] two, three year period, and what I was processing. I [wanted] to find a way that nods to that, and the significance of that — albeit, not necessarily in a way that was a lockdown album or a pandemic album, or songs that focus on the nuances of that experience, but at least acknowledge the journey. And it's taking the structure of that journey as imagined by Dante, these Nine Circles he walks through and then he comes out the other side.

I kind of viewed the last album as all these same voices sort of singing or screaming into the same bonfire, all from different perspectives. That's something that I wanted, in particular, to explore in this album — that each Circle is a slightly different voice. It deals with a slightly different theme, in a playful way, sometimes. 

[Dante's Inferno] is a poem about a person who's wandering through this sort of underworld space, and in each Circle, they meet with a new person who shares their grievance, their pain, their experience. That was something I allowed myself to play with a little bit — that each song starts with my voice, but it allows into itself and the license to just let the song grow to where it needs to be. Let the voice explore the idea that it needs to explore.

Something that I had hoped to achieve with these is that the songs come from a personal place, and a very real place, but I also wanted them to explore, at times, things that were kind of mythological in nature, or were collectively held fictions. Like in the case of "Francesca," who is a character in Dante's Inferno [Second Circle, Lust], and she's not a terribly famous character from literature, but it's definitely a significant moment in that poem.

It's a song that I wrote for somebody in a difficult moment and was finding a lot of themes with that character. I just resonated with a lot of stuff in her story. This fictional idea that there is this woman who is being punished in Hell for falling in love. 

The [ending] lyric is "Heaven is not fit to house a love like you and I, I would not change it each time." The song is basically saying this isn't a punishment, I would make this decision time and time again. I don't regret or repent anything." [I tried to] explore that and sort of turn that punishment on its head, and write from an empathetic point of view of some of the characters in that poem.

So it's song by song, and depending on where the theme is — like, "First Time" plays with Limbo, this idea of this never ending thing that cycles. That song explores this kind of birth and the sort of death and ending at the end of a relationship where everything feels like it's collapsing around you, and it being the start of the next thing.

Then "Eat Your Young," Circle of Greed, it reflects upon how the real destruction in a global sense, in a larger sense, is not done. It reflects on being young, that sort of coming-of-age feeling of just being free and powerless, but having fun and enjoying the little things that you can enjoy, and how every generation will always blame the younger generation for our coming destruction in some way — some very imaginative, funny way. The Circle of Violence, "Butchered Tongue" looks back at sort of historical violence, colonial violence, and the destruction of language that comes out of it.

It was just finding the sympathy between "Okay, here's this theme, and here's these elements of the song. And there is personal experience, but at the same time, I'm nodding to and playing with the images found in either myths of characters that are dead — so Icarus, who dies at the end of his myth; De Selby is a fictional character in a book about a man who doesn't know that he's dead; Francesca, Dante includes her into population of Hell. 

"Son of Nyx" is named after Alex Ryan, who co-wrote that song with me, his father's name is Nick, so Alex is technically a son of Nick's. Nyx is a Greek goddess of nighttime — so again, reflecting on darkness — and a son of Nyx in the Greek stable is the boatman or the ferryman, Charon, who ferries everybody over the river. The song has a life above ground and below ground, and trying to find that sympathy points between the two.

It was also important to me that you can just listen to the songs and know nothing about this and be able to say "That sounds beautiful," or "There is something in that that is universal." These themes are universal — the theme of lust is universal, the theme of loss, and betrayal, and being hurt by somebody is universal. We love and listen to and write these songs every single day. But creating the album in this structure and arranging the themes in sympathy with the circles as Dante imagined it was something I really wanted to do.

It's important to me that these songs just feel good. That they exist on their own terms in a way that I felt was worthwhile and beautiful enough to exist on their own too.

I will say I struggled with where the line was with how tightly to hold the poem. There's an early version of "Francesca" which I tried to write using the same rhyming scheme that Dante uses in the poem — he invented a rhyming scheme called terza rima. He was kind of obsessed with this idea of Trinity, he invents this interlocking triplet thing, which is like, really, really hard to write in English. 

Somewhere early in the album [process], I realized the more I referenced the text and the poem directly, the less universal it is, the less open it is, and it becomes, like, a history lesson. And actually, it became like musical theater as well too, because it was like referencing these moments in this journey, as opposed to just exploring moments in the journey of life that we all experience. So these feelings of betrayal, these feelings of disillusionment, and loneliness or love.

There's all sorts of reasons [I used the Irish language on this album]. I mean, part of it was being at home for the year for those years, and reassessing my place at home during that pandemic period.

But, ultimately, the Irish language is a language that a lot of us in Ireland like study for 12 years, and I guess I just got to this point where it's like I had this entire palette of mouth sounds, this entire palette of words, this whole language that was in my vocabulary — it's kind of like a bunch of tools hanging on the wall at home that I just never used.

An example of that is uiscefhuaraithe, which is described in "To Someone From A Warm Climate" as the cooling action of water. It just seemed right. It's like why not use these tools? It's like all these paints that I just never painted with. 

"Butchered Tongue" explores the sort of experience of traveling around the world with the Irish view of history, or with a view of history and global politics that's informed by the Irish experience or my Irish experience, and my understanding of Irish history.

I [channeled] the playfulness of the Irish language on a song called "Anything But." On paper, it reads like a kindness. The verses are saying, "If I was a riptide, I wouldn't take you out." The second verse says, "If I was a stampede, you wouldn't you wouldn't get a kick." These are all Irish-isms that I heard as a teenager growing up. They're nice ways of saying that somebody wants nothing to do with you. So that's where that double meaning sort of thing comes in. They're all they're all Irish-isms, fun idioms.

I'd written many songs — actually, the majority of the songs from my first two albums — I just wrote everything myself. Writing for me was always a very solitary thing. And then I sort of found the limitations of what solitude and writing in solitude would give me towards the end of lockdown. I'd written a bunch of ideas. I've gotten a lot of ideas out of my pockets and out of my head, and then I kind of got into LA.

I'd never worked with Dan Tannenbaum, who's done a lot of stuff with Kendrick Lamar. [He's an] incredible producer and his team, Pete Gonzales and Daniel Krieger, and this fantastic team of guys are all incredible musicians. Our first day of jamming, I honestly thought that we were going to hang out for a talk, and we were just going to get to know each other. And then he sort of threw a microphone in my hand and was like, "Let's make some music." 

So for the first time I just jammed. We just jammed music together and would create these soundscapes. I knew that I wanted to explore classic synthesizer sounds and some more electronic sounds, but marry them to organic acoustic sounds, like in the case of "De Selby (Part 1)," or in "First Light" or in "Anything But."

Part of that was also just creating with musicians that I've never created with before, and then knowing where the line was of what felt right to me, and not a diversion, but an exploration and an expansion. It was just trusting the skills of these great producers and their great musicianship, and just creating for the sake of creating and seeing what came out of it. It was really enriching and super exciting, because it was a new way of writing for me.

With Jen Decilveo and Jeff Gitty [Gitelman], two other fantastic producers across the album, I was recording a few songs with Jen separately, I was recording a few songs with Jeff. So I became the sort of central point of making sure that these songs would all work together as an arc. 

I tried to do something which I thought was going to be a fun and interesting challenge, and I feel like I did that as best I could. I gained all these wonderful skills of collaborating, and also being the central point of like trying to hold a lot of spinning plates with different producers and make everything work in a cohesive way and just being that one central point between a lot of creative minds. So I'm proud of it. And I'm excited to explore those skills again.

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