Hozier

It’s not often that you stumble across a songwriter whose lyrics both sound and read like poetry. When those lyrics are set to music that balances burning indignation with lilting tenderness, and delivered in a voice imbued with the spiritual passion and yearning of gospel and the blues, you figure you’ve chanced upon something special. And so it is with 23-year-old Andrew Hozier-Byrne, an Irish singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist from County Wicklow who goes by the name of Hozier.

On his introductory Take Me To Church EP, the fire-and-brimstone title track – with an incendiary video to accompany it, directed by Brendan Canty and interlacing a storyline in which a homophobic lynch mob hunts down two gay men with footage of demonstrators in Russia protesting about president Putin’s recent anti-gay legislation – made a point that is not only worthwhile but, for Hozier, crucial. “The song was born of this idea that a child, when it is born, is born into sin. So, before you are a woman, or a gay man, just as a person, you are being undermined by the Catholic church as somebody who is sinful, as somebody who should be ashamed of yourself, and be begging for forgiveness. I wanted to use sex as a celebration of life; there are few things as human as the act of making love.”

“Take Me to Church,” is a song about sexuality, freedom and humanity, whose lyrics capture the beguiling mix of conviction and mischief that so characterizes his approach to songwriting. Elsewhere on the EP, he looked back on his first, crushing love affair, detailing it both as nostalgic chronicler and as if he was still within the relationship.