Unreal Unearth - Blog Posts

Doodle I did of hozier as lesbian Jesus

I wish I was a Mayfly (𝒷𝓊𝓏𝓏𝒾𝓃ℊ 𝓃ℴ𝒾𝓈ℯ𝓈)🦟🦟🦟🦟🦟 on the River Tay

HE. TOUCHED. MY. HAND.

Kaos being cancelled rlly sucks and I’m sad we don’t see the continuation of the story but lord in heaven how do you make Orpheus Chris Martin when hozier was right there yearning and trying to bury himself, ascending to a higher plane of existence, viewing all his past lives, realising he is in fact the reincarnation of Orpheus and meanwhile Chris Martin is probably out there making a salad without dressing

you're in her dms I'm thinking i owe my life to flowers that were left here by my mother that gift life to her again we are not the same

my favorite song from the album for a number of reasons, but most importantly it never fails to make me cry. the number of times I had to bring myself to skip it only because I was in public and couldn't cry my heart out listening to it... uncountable.

Butchered Tongue being on the Unreal Unearth album is so quintessentially Hozier to me cause he was like yes I’m going through a terrible breakup yes it has changed me in irreversible ways and YES I’m still pissed off and disgusted by colonialism if you were wondering btw

absolutely love the album but the cover keeps reminding me of Jack Stauber for some reason

⚠️⚠️TW: Open Wound⚠️⚠️

I just love the parallels of this lyric (throwing uo and smashing plates rn)

[Jeez click the pic for higher qual ig]

Im having so much fun overanalyzing unreal unearth in my fb account i fear that i might spam my moots with it

Hozier really said to future generations, it’s not your fault. You can’t “work hard” and get what you need and want. It’s not your fault that the dreams of fifty years are now unrealistic and unattainable without breaking your soul and maybe not even getting it. You were fucked over before you came into this world, and they continue to fuck you over so much that it’s better to live your life as you see fit. It would be easier because being young and living as you want won’t ruin you but abiding by the systems most likely will.

feeling this so deeply in my soul after seeing him in concert last night

The way Hozier just stands with his hands in his pockets and casually belts. It should be a crime.

literally the best explanation of what this album is oml-

thinking about the recurring theme of identity in unreal unearth, and how the speaker's sense of identity is most frequently tied to his relationship, and the connectedness between them, where the relationship was so transformative that it fundamentally changed him, and now that the relationship is dead, he needs to bury those parts of himself that were born out of the relationship and forge new ones, in which we follow him as he travels through the circles of hell in the afterlife to deposit those fragments of identity and moments from the relationship so that he can emerge changed and with a new definition of himself and his identity in this essay I will-

Swan upon Leda is so heartbreakingly beautiful and is still bringing tears to my eyes every time i hear it

how is anyone supposed to be normal after listening to Hozier???????????? I get u now Orpheus story, I fucking gET YOu nOw

howling outside hozier's door atm

take me to church(hozier's concert)

y'all remember when dante wrote a fanfiction of the bible and then hozier wrote a fanfiction of said fanfiction?? iconic if you ask me

i'm fairly sure that each time i hear "and though I burn how could I fall when I am lifted by every word you say to me'' my soul literally leaves my body and i start levitating

the only important question you should ask yourself every morning is whether it's a "take me to the lakes" or "take me to church" kinda day and plan it based on the answer

some part of me must have died each time that hozier called someone baby

"I'll tell them put me back in it/ Darling, I would do it again/ If I could hold you for a minute/ Darling, I'd go through it again," -Francesca, Hozier

Unknown / Nth – warm hands cupping your face, soft brown jumpers, trembling fingers, tear‐stained cheeks, the smell of old books and lavender, writing letters that will never be sent, a trip to Italy in autumn, love so strong it makes you weep, years and years of longing, faded postcards stuck to a wall, learning how to forgive and be gentle.

i think hozier IS a like a mythical forest creature, but not in the way most people think. like he's a creature who fell in love with a marginalized human person and came out of the forest into the real world and realized how fucked up everything is and tried to do the Prometheus thing of bringing us fire but it backfired and he's in constant battle with the fae gods and now has to watch his human lover die so he's constantly talking about the horrors of the human world, but this is the place that gave him his lover so how can he hate it truly?

So, First Light wasn’t the first (ha) song from Unreal Unearth to grab me, but a couple days ago it hit me like a truck and I have so many thoughts?

As an album closer, First Light is the exhale, the emergence from hell, but I think it’s also sorta about Hozier, or the narrator rather, romanticizing the mundane? Like, these lines:

One bright morning changes all things Soft and easy as your breathing, you wake Your eyes open at first a thousand miles away But turning shoot a silver bullet point-blank range And I can scarce believe what I'm believing in Could this be how every day begins?

The narrator wakes up in bed with his new lover. At first they’re groggy, then they see him, and BOOM, that look, the one of recognition/love that completely pierces him to the soul, that makes him question if this is real, if this can last

The sky set to burst The gold and the rust The colour erupts You filling my cup The sun coming up

… it’s just the sunrise. Pretty colors on the horizon, and his lover pouring him a cup of coffee. Such an ordinary act, a commonplace moment, yet it means so much more.

Like I lived my whole life Before the first light Like I lived my whole life Before the first light

And yet that’s enough, to overwhelm him with this sense of change, of this new version of himself, of new joy so intense it obliterates all that came before…

One bright morning goes so easy Darkness always finds you either way It creeps into the corners as the moment fades A voice your body jumps to calling out your name But after this I'm never gonna be the same And I am never going back again

That morning, that moment, is lovely, but it’s ephemeral. Darkness can and does return, it always will. But his lover calls his name, and he can’t help but respond to it, and be changed by it, this new self he shares with a lover, the new self he will become even if it ends.

The only way is forward, and that’s the beauty and tragedy of it all. It happens to almost everyone, at some point or other, and it’s so normal but it matters so much.

"Hold me like water. Or christ, hold me like a knife", he put it into words the need the human desperation to be held and chosen and wanted and just be in your lovers arms to be chosen either way to submit to them no matter how they want you, to choose it no matter what, as long as it's them, as long as they want you.

Everyone just thinks that hozier vibes are just cottage core with trees and animals and all that stuff, but i raise you Hozier's album vibes being:

Self titled: a beautifully old pub, with random guys in the corner screaming laughter with beers on their hands, a beautiful group of women happy in a table at the centre and a guy alone on one of the stools writing his diary

Wasteland, baby: a destroyed town due to some man made disaster and all that's left are ashes of what was once there and a couple that just fell for each other coming back to see what's left of it

Unreal Unearth: well maintained but abandoned cathedral at night with its affreschi coming off, a broken painting in the corner, and infinite history underneath it, a guy looking at all of it right after having his heart broken for the first time

unreal unearth has so many echoes of his debut album. "de selby pt 2" and "to be alone" in the desire to kill the lights and become one, "butchered tongue" and "foreigner's god" in the struggles of language, "first time" and a very early interview where he describes falling in love as a death. it's not a rehash - it feels like simply a returning, reflecting on those same themes (and on, perhaps, the same events that inspired them) through new eyes. as a long time fan, it feels like coming home

Same vibes

when hozier said “the likes of a darkness so deep that god at the start couldn’t bear” and when hozier said “i’d still know you not being shown you i only need the working of my hands” and when hozier said “some part of me must have died the first time that you called me baby” and when hozier said “i would still be surprised i could find you darling in any life” and when hozier said “heaven is not fit to house a love like you and i” and when hozier said “but if we fall i only pray don’t fall away from me” and when hozier said “you were steering my heart like a wheel in your hands and darling i haven’t felt it since then” and when hozier said “if there was anyone to ever get through this life with their heart still intact they didn’t do it right” and when hozier said “if i was a riptide i wouldn’t take you out” and when hozier said “darling there’s a part of me i’m afraid will always be trapped within an abstract from a moment of my life” and when hozier said “do you know i could break beneath the weight of the goodness love i still carry for you” and when hozier said “darkness always finds you either way it creeps into the corners as the moment fades” and when

Hozier writing De Selby (Part 2) inspired by a character in Flann O’Brien’s novel The Third Policeman makes the music video so much more compelling and absolutely bananas to watch, not just because Domhnall Gleeson is a treasure and delivers a killer performance without even saying anything, but also like… let me get into the lore of this:

The Third Policeman is about this mad scientist/philosopher/scholar who robs and murders someone in the midst of academic pursuit and enters this literal nightmare world where he’s punished by these policemen who are monsters and is doomed to repeat his mistakes forever. And the visuals of Domhnall Gleeson’s character are so similar the drawing of the central characters of the novel as seen above. The shabby brownish clothing, the hair colour, the shovel in hand, it all matches.

The story is also a slight condemnation of science and views trying to establish ultimate truth as prideful and heresy. As an article from The Irish Times on The Third Policeman states: “As a consequence, all theories are crackpot, all knowledge is useless and the only meaning is that life is a hell of endless repetition.”

it also states, on the novel: “To illustrate the futility of scientific theorising, O’Brien uses a recurrent theme of infinite regression. One of the characters has eyes with a pinpoint behind which are eyes with another pinpoint and so on to infinity; the narrator wonders if his soul is “a body with another body inside it in turn, thousands of such bodies within each other like the skins of an onion, receding to some unimaginable ultimum”; De Selby studies in a series of parallel mirrors infinite reflections of his face going back to early youth; and Policeman MacCruiskeen has constructed a series of nested chests with the last few so small that they are no longer visible to the naked eye. So speculation and experiment are mad activities that literally disappear into nothingness.”

And then we see Dumhnall Gleeson in the music video on a cycle he doesn’t know how to break, some violent repetition where he’s burying himself and going crazy, and the imagery of several versions of one person fits this PERFECTLY.