Hozier

A frozen attic in Bray, County Wicklow, 2013. Andrew Hozier-Byrne records the vocals for a demo at two in the morning with a cheap sound card and a borrowed microphone.

And there was no budget or marketing strategy behind it.

His father played drums in local blues bands, and his mother designed record covers, while the house filled with Muddy Waters and Skip James vinyl. Hozier enrolled at Trinity College Dublin to study basic music theory. But he lasted only a single term in the classroom because he preferred singing with the Anúna choir and locking himself away to mix choral pieces that sounded like rusty gospel.

When filmmaker Brendan Canty shot the black-and-white music video for Take Me to Church in Cork, focusing on institutional homophobic violence in Russia, the footage spread across internet forums without any middlemen.

No one expected that compressed link to crash Reddit's servers.

Within a few months, the song amassed more than five hundred million streams on digital platforms, and Universal Music put a contract on the table without requiring any changes to the original masters.

The Weight of an Accidental Anthem

The self-titled debut album, released in September 2014 under the technical supervision of producer Rob Kirwan, confirmed a deep, gritty voice. Songs such as From Eden or Cherry Wine, the latter recorded at five in the morning in the courtyard of an abandoned house in Kildare, leaned on clean acoustic guitar and birdsong in the background.

The industry expected an endless tour of American stadiums and constant appearances on television galas.

So he decided to break the market's momentum and holed up in the countryside for four years.

In 2016, he wrote Better Love for the film The Legend of Tarzan, a big-budget commission where he handled the orchestral string arrangements without losing the blues-based percussive foundation. Two years later, in 2018, he released the EP Nina Cried Power, bringing Mavis Staples into the studio to pay tribute to the activists of the civil rights marches.

His second full-length album, Wasteland, Baby!, came out in March 2019 and reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200, defying the predictions of dominant pop.

It was a raw blues song disguised as radio-friendly production.

The Descent Through the Nine Circles

During 2020 months of isolation, Hozier closely read Dante Alighieri's Inferno. That reading shaped the narrative structure of his third album, Unreal Unearth, released in August 2023 as a journey divided into the circles of the Italian classic.

For that album, he recorded entire passages in Irish Gaelic within tracks such as De Selby (Part 1), weaving a minority language into an album built for massive arenas.

In 2022, Bear McCreary recruited him to compose Blood Upon the Snow, the main theme of the video game God of War Ragnarök, delving into an epic sound supported by cellos and Nordic percussion.

But the most aggressive commercial impact of this stage came from a leftover from those same sessions, released in March 2024 as part of the EP Unheard.

The track Too Sweet shot up global charts and gave the Irish musician his first No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in April 2024, eleven years after his initial breakthrough.

For the final mix of that track at Metropolis Studios in London, four heavily distorted electric bass tracks were run in parallel, a 670 Fairchild analog compressor was used, and high frequencies were severely cut from the snare drum.