Hozier

The County Wicklow musician released Take Me to Church in 2013, before the self-titled debut album arrived in 2014. The song used a forceful, gospel-coloured arrangement to carry a confrontation between intimate experience and institutional judgement. Its chorus had the scale of a public declaration, while the writing remained rooted in the body and a particular emotional relationship.

The album also included From Eden, Jackie and Wilson, and Work Song. Those tracks made the range clearer, drawing on blues, soul and folk without making the musical inheritance a museum display. The rhythm could be supple or emphatic, and backing voices often added another human presence rather than simply enlarging the lead.

Wasteland, Baby! appeared in 2019, with Movement and Almost (Sweet Music) providing contrasting entrances. The latter folds references to older songs into a new emotional scene, while the title track gives the album a much more fragile ending. Large-scale anxieties and intimate observations sit together without requiring every song to resolve them in the same way.

Unreal Unearth followed in 2023, using Dante's Inferno as part of its organising framework. Irish-language passages and songs such as Francesca extended the record's sense of descent, encounter and return. The concept gives the sequence a structure, but the individual performances remain important: Hozier can make an elaborate literary frame feel close through the placement of a single line, then let the band widen the scene around it.