Album: Eat Your Young - Single

After four years Hozier is back with three incredible offerings and a promise of more this fall. Clean, sharp production; witty and intelligent lyrics, and that voice. And to the ignorant “reviewer” who believes this is about satanic ritual and child abuse, it is Hozier’s take on Irish author Jonathan Swift’s 1729 satirical essay, “A Modest Proposal” designed to bring to light the horrible treatment of the poor by the Church and by the British. Hozier is actually trying to help children but you are too thick to figure that out.

Quit claiming satanism you holier-than-thou freaks 😂 😂

I really do keep his album Wasteland Baby! at the top of my bookshelf so you can imagine the utter JOY I felt when I saw he released Eat Your Young. i LITERALLY went from laying on the floor kicking and screaming silently to sitting up to silently screaming to then bouncing around my room just clapping and dancing I AM IN HEAVEN!!!! aight internet lingo speak time. oh he did that! he ATE that! my edges are FLOURISHING. my skin is CLEARING up. i am ASCENDIN to heaven dot com! ok. buy this. omg All Things End? GRAMMYS BETTER ACT RIGHT AND GO AHEAD AND PUT HIS NAME ON THE GRAMMY.

The epic, lifting, bright-sultry movie trailer/Bond film feel of “Eat Your Young” opens this EP with a sizzle, outlining the bone-deep hunger present in domestic love and life and establishing immediate anticipation for the story that will follow. That energy, whizzing through the air, drains down into a remarkably clean, lonely breakup song - “All Things End,” which, in a total 180 to what we’ve come to expect from Hozier, brings forth the image of an uninhabited, sparsely furnished contemporary-style penthouse apartment with its sparing, keyboard-heavy accompaniment and cutting clarity. It feels like a huge departure from the green, mythic, topsoil-rich hymns of love we know him for until the end, where that familiar gospel chorus joins him, sending the track out on a swelling wave of hope and community. That wave becomes literal in the final act (and my favorite of the EP), “Through Me (The Flood),” opening with a lone man swimming out into the storm-tossed sea to tell a tale of perseverance, immeasurable depths, and the interconnectedness of all things. Of the three tracks it feels closest, tonally, to his established style, metaphor-rich and gritty with a powerfully drumming pulse and a combination of soaring and humming vocals. The bog man returns us to the earth once again in the second stanza, and by the end of the EP we are granted the knowledge that, while all things end, they remain a part of us (and us, a part of them).

Jesus. Have mercy.