Unreal Unearth - How Hozier's New Album Captures The Poetry That Lives Between Love and Loss

It is a Monday evening and I am making my way home. I am spent on a day of mundanity and the regretful sense that I am not quite living, keen to start fresh tomorrow with the determination that I will be someone different by the morning, someone whole.

Yet somewhere between De Selby (Part 1) and Francesca I have decided to drive further from the comforts that exist behind my locked door; glowing lights, lullaby reading and the slow slip into deep dreaming.

Instead, I am overwhelmed with the need to drive aimlessly across the pretty little country roads that spill out before me while I let Hozier’s new album, Unreal Unearth, wash over me.

I do my best listening and thinking behind the wheel of my shabby Chevy. The sky above me glows with a navy hue and my cheeks are wet from crying.

---

The first verse of Unreal Unearths fifth track I, Carrion (Icarian) has reminded me of falling in love and the blindness with which I have been known to thrown myself into it.

I feel lighter than I have in so much time
I've crossed the border line of weightless
One deep breath out from the sky
I've reached a rarer height now that I can confirm
All our weight is just a burden offered to us by the world

What a miracle, the lightness that descends upon us at the birth of a new love and the ways in which the risk of heartbreak, the burden it brings, can be initially forgotten.

A sure fire way to find yourself flying higher into the sun, like Icarus, and the inevitable flames that engulf a love developed; for better or worse.

More than one song from Hozier’s highly sought-after third album reduces me to tears of various meaning in the otherwise quietness of my solidary drive.

Each song is layered in conflicting emotions, a real sense of bitter-sweet memory and the painful insatiability for another soul.

---

His third track First Time begins with a verse that feels like it escaped my own thoughts and made its way to his hand for writing and his mouth for singing, creating meaning from the fuzzy longing that lingers in my mind still.

Remember once I told you about
How before I heard it from your mouth
My name would always hit my ears as such an awful sound
And the soul, if that's what you'd call it
Uneasy ally of the body, it felt nameless as a river
Undiscovered underground

I quickly come to terms with what this album does for my soul and no doubt other listeners who find their heart still broken from lovers who have likely forgotten what it sounds like to say our names out loud.

Throughout the album, Hozier seems to dissect memory and make-believe, weaving in reference from poetry and literary classics, specifically a Dante-an theme that he revisits throughout the album.

This is by no means a wholly unique inspiration but something about Hozier’s reading and rewriting of the work makes it feel entirely fresh; brimming with sensuality, tragedy and eroticism (Eat Your Young may be the sexiest song I’ve ever heard).

---

Most impressive, though, is Hozier’s crushing ability to create an album that splices love and longing, plaiting them together in beautiful braids and then ripping them apart, capturing the horrors of loss amongst the broken frays.

It is within these horrors that we find such melancholic beauty, the ripe deliciousness of a love unrequited or otherwise lost. How we, as mere humans, cannot help ourselves in chasing the highs of love, that which floats above ground, and then wallow in the despair of losing such love, that which dwells beneath us.

The album’s fifteenth track Unknown/Nth reaches a cold hand into my chest and pulls out a chorus that hurts to listen to:

It ain't the being alone
It ain't the empty home, baby
You know I'm good on my own
Sha-la-la, baby, you know, it's more the being unknown
And there are some people, love, who are better unknown

Recalling treachery, the ninth circle of hell, Hozier sings of a crushing betrayal and the ways in which we all have the ability to hurt those that we love, and how the betrayed cannot help but to hold onto historical love despite fresh pain.

Cue a devastating bridge;

Do you know I could break beneath the weight?
Of the goodness, love, I still carry for you
That I'd walk so far just to take
The injury of finally knowin' you

Just punch me in the chest, Hozier. It would hurt less. How painfully true this rings, though, for what else could live between the enormity of falling in love and the little death that is losing it?

Nestled between the two is this overspill of emotion, the sting of feeling so foolish, an experience I know all too well and have been trying to articulate for what feels like the longest time.

For while a love might find itself unrequited, how they may very well say no to trepid outreach, such love does not disappear with the haste one begs for.

It lives and grows heavier with the weight of belief in the goodness of you, as Hozier sings, and how knowing you and the ways in which you break a heart does not rid oneself of the love carried for you.

---

Hozier’s talent for harnessing bold emotions and making them lyrically devastating as well as melodically pleasing is no less impressive within Unreal Unearth then it was in his debut album.

The sense of strength in storytelling and a concoction of folk, soul and funk leave an earthy, carnal taste in ones mouth, giving just enough sweetness in that Irish twang to confirm him entirely recognizable in each song.

I have felt a sense of grief for an ending I did not want for a few months now, learning to accept another’s decision to begin the descent into being strangers, and I have spent hours writing in an attempt to articulate the sense of love, foolishness, humility, carnal desire, longing and loss.

Yet here is it, in one ethereal, otherworldly album that threatens to provoke new tears with each repeated listen; conjuring deep emotions for all those who feel absolutely everything but find themselves lost to silence when trying to speak of it.