Earlier this year, Hozier scored his first-ever U.S. #1 hit with “Too Sweet,” a song that didn’t make the final cut of his last full-length album, Unreal Unearth. It’s hard to believe he didn’t release it because was he felt people wouldn’t like it or care about it.
Speaking to Rolling Stone, Hozier says, “Maybe it’s the pessimist in me. I was like, ‘People don’t want to hear this stuff, we’ll just put it away.’” But when he decided to put the song on his EP of outtakes, Unheard, and then release it as a single, he became the first Irish act to top the Billboard Hot 100 since the late Sinéad O’Connor in 1990.
Hozier is back with another EP of outtakes, Unaired, which came out on Aug. 16. The first single, “Nobody’s Soldier,” is about the frustrating and helpless experience of watching war and violence from afar. He says he chose it as a direct contrast to “Too Sweet.”
Too Sweet’ is one of the most lighthearted, fun songs that I’ve ever put out,” Hozier says. “So part of me was like, ‘Well, I better follow this up with an anti-war song.’”
Some of the other songs on Unaired were, like the songs on Unreal Unearth, inspired by Dante‘s Inferno, which is part of the narrative poem The Divine Comedy. Hozier says he’s so into poetry that he’d like to go back to school to study it.
“I think poetry is something that I could probably put my focus into — and be hungry for — if I got rid of all other distractions,” he says. “I’ve thought about it for a long time.”
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