Apple Music host Zane Lowe said of ‘Unreal Unearth’, “It’s rare that you hear an album that can put you in this beautiful, uplifting, reflective space.”

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Hozier joins Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1 for a conversation around his recently released album, Unreal Unearth. During the interview, Lowe notes that, “It’s rare that you hear an album that can put you in this beautiful, uplifting, reflective space. It’s like no album I’ve heard in a long time.”

During the conversation – which you can consult in full below – the two men talk about various topics. They dive into Hozier’s inspiration for the album and his songwriting. Note also that the Irish singer-songwriter addresses the impact of his first album, adding the hit single “Take Me to Church,” reflecting on the project 10 years later.

Reflecting on the themes he explored during the making of Unreal Unearth, Hozier said “I knew that there was a lot of light and shade on the record, for sure. And knew that it was going to be part of the idea of touching on these themes that are all kind of universal, like playing with this idea of circles.

“I knew it would be a broad topic, but there’s also. . . yeah, you can’t. . . with that, it’s like any delight of falling in love, or breaking up, or thinking about it after the fact, OR having a delight. In the moment , it’s not a perfectly good thing.

Expanding further on the channeling and crafting of his composition, Hozier said: “I think I turned to it first for myself. I didn’t think it would be as inspiring as this. I’ve tried to move on to this poem. Part of me, as a lyricist, I guess, had all those poems that I sought to address, all those old poems.

“Yeah, it is very human…The feeling was, there was always some part of me, and this is the macabre part of me, and there’s a kind of … Even since I was a child, I just wanted to hear this long, very descriptive, very visual telling of a man walking through hell, in a very visual way. And so inventive. So there’s that part of me.”

Later on in the interview, Hozier also touched on the impact of his breakthrough hit “Take Me To Church” on his career and reflecting on that 10 years later…

“I think it was too heavy,” he admits. “I was proud of that song, and there was some part of me deep down, if I could admit this, that felt that song needed to be written and it needed to be written for me. And I was an unsigned, unknown Irish musician. I’d never sold out of [small Dublin venue] Whelan’s, I’d never played at Whelan’s. You know what I mean? I was doing open mic cover songs and stuff. So to write that I imagined that it might be appreciated by a small group of people.

“I think in my field or in my song tradition, there’s not a huge amount of confrontational truth telling. We’re maybe at a low ebb for that at the moment, but that’s really only maybe in my field, in my same song tradition.”

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