Hozier will headline the Hinterland Music Festival in Saint Charles on Friday

It’s been ten years since the release of “Take Me to Church,” the crossover hit single that catapulted Hozier to global stardom and established the Wicklow County native in Ireland as a new artist to watch on the music scene.

The music video for the song was posted to YouTube on September 25, 2013 and went viral almost immediately.

This response attracted the attention of major labels worldwide and Hozier was signed by Columbia Records in America, who released Hozier’s self-titled debut album in September 2014.

“Take Me to Church” naturally became the album’s lead single, reaching No. 2 on Billboard magazine’s all-genre Hot 100 singles chart in December 2014. By the time the tour behind the debut album wrapped in late 2016, the self-titled album had gone double platinum and Hozier was a bona fide star.

Fans can see him perform on Friday, August 2, 2024, the first of three days of music at the Hinterland Music Festival in Saint Charles, about 30 minutes south of Des Moines.

Sometimes, though, signature songs like “Take Me to Church” can have unwelcome side effects. Artists can be judged on the success of a monster hit and laughed at if they don’t reach those heights again. Or the song can wear down artists who feel like they have to play it at every concert, year after year, from that point on.

Hozier has no such problems when it comes to “Take Me to Church.”

“I was kind of operating from a pretty indie or alternative space, and then that song catapulted me into really, really popular realms in the way that it charted. It definitely changed my life,” Hozier said, reflecting on the song in a recent video interview. “And I was pretty proud of it when I wrote it, and what the mission of it was and what I was hoping to convey. In some ways, I’m really happy and grateful for that. But if any of my songs can have the kind of reach that that song had, I’m really happy that it was ‘Take Me to Church.'”

Despite the song’s impact, the man born Andrew Hozier-Byrne 34 years ago seems to have escaped the “Take Me to Church Guy” moniker. For one thing, he’s had more hit singles — including “From Eden” and “Someone New” from the self-titled album and “Almost (Sweet Music)” from his gold-certified sophomore effort, 2019’s Wasteland, Baby! And most recently, “Too Sweet,” the single from his recently released EP Unheard, which features four songs from the same sessions that produced his current full-length album Unreal Unearth, became his first song to top Billboard magazine’s all-genre Hot 100 singles chart.

He also shows considerable artistic growth. “Unreal Unearth” seems to confirm the idea that he has the talent and creativity to fuel a career that will last not just years, but decades.

From the project’s inception, Hozier wanted to take his sound to new heights and he collaborated with a number of songwriter/producers to achieve this goal, with Jeff “Gitty” Gitelman, Daniel Tannenbaum and Jennifer Decilveo being the key contributors.

“I knew I wanted to go wide. I knew I wanted to expand into kind of soundscapes to play with,” Hozier said, noting that he wanted to blend vintage synthesizers and other synthetic sounds with strings and other organic instruments. “I didn’t really want to limit anything. I just wanted to explore it and then make sense of it, let each song be what it needed to be and explore the spaces that it needed to explore. In that way, it became kind of expansive and varied. I was playing with a lot of sonic textures.”

Thematically, “Unreal Unearth” is also rich. Its 16 tracks offer a journey from darkness to light that mirrors the pandemic experience and also references “Dante’s Inferno” and Dante’s walk through the nine circles of hell. Hozier uses these as a backdrop for lyrics that he says touch on a range of uncertainty and upheaval he’s experienced himself or has experienced with people he knows, ranging from loss and love, feelings of disillusionment and a determination to recalibrate daily life to better align with personal goals for work, social lives, family life and relationships.

“As with any album, when you’re writing from a personal place, you’re processing and combating personal experiences over a period of time, or (making) personal observations or whatever about the world around you,” Hozier said. “But … a lot of those experiences happened in a very, very specific, unique and prescient time for the world, in a pandemic. I wanted to acknowledge those circumstances and gesture and give some kind of credit for getting into something — the pandemic — and coming out the other side without necessarily writing songs or writing an album that was specifically focused on the experience of the lockdown, the experience of the pandemic.”

To translate the kaleidoscopic sound of “Unreal Unearth” (and a healthy selection of songs from his first two albums) to the live stage, Hozier has assembled a large touring band with plenty of instrumental and vocal versatility.

“There are nine of us,” he said. “There are two string players. There is a violin player who also plays guitar, there is a cellist who also plays guitar, there is an organ and synthesizer player who is also a Latin American percussionist. Yeah, there are nine of us and everyone is a multi-instrumentalist in some way, and everyone is a singer. So we have nine voices on stage and nine multi-instrumentalists.”