Irish singer-songwriter Hozier returns today with Unreal Unearth, his third studio album and the follow-up to 2019’s Wasteland, Baby! That album became his first to top the Billboard 200 chart and spawned streaming hits like “Would That I” and “Almost (Sweet Music).”
Unreal Unearth was partly inspired by Inferno, the first half of Italian poet Dante Alighieri’s 14th century classic The Divine Comedy. It’s one of the books Hozier read while locked up in his early-1700s home in Wicklow, England, during the pandemic—a period that also provided a great deal of inspiration for the record.
“I was confronted with things that were working in my life, and things that weren’t,” he told Independent. “Things were changing and shifting. People, careers, habits, places … relationships around me were breaking down and forming in new ways.”
Hozier began teasing Unreal Unearth as far back as March, when he dropped the EP Eat Your Young, a collection of three songs that also appear on this album. The following month, the EP’s title track and Unreal Unearth’s lead single became his first song to crack the Billboard Hot 100 since 2014’s “Take Me To Church.”
