Music

A full 10 years ago, global audiences got to know Andrew Hozier-Byrne — the Irish singer-songwriter known to most simply as Hozier — with his smash “Take Me to Church.” Written and released while he was still an independent artist playing Dublin open mics, the howling alt-folk ballad decried religious institutional hypocrisy and turned into enough of a surprise hit to get licensed to Columbia Records. It became omnipresent and climbed to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100; Hozier, in turn, became one of 2014’s biggest breakout stars.

But over the next decade, he never matched its crossover success. That is, until this year: with “Too Sweet,” a slinky pop-soul ode to responsible decadence that once again made Hozier’s haunting wail unavoidable across multiple radio formats. The song (from his now ironically titled Unheard EP) became a runaway prerelease success in snippet form on TikTok, then on streaming services once the full song dropped in March, and then on the Hot 100 in April as it debuted at No. 5 and eventually did “Church” one better by topping the chart three weeks later, as well as the Pop Airplay and Rock & Alternative Airplay lists. For most artists who have gone 10 years without a major pop hit, its success would have been an absolute godsend — a comeback-marking, career-defining moment of validation.

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For Hozier? Eh, it was a nice bonus.

Which isn’t to say that he’s not thankful for the song’s streaming virality or for its subsequent pop radio crossover — the unassuming (and strikingly modest) artist projects only gratitude and humility when talking about his 2024 wins. It’s just that… well, the song’s chart takeover hasn’t really changed his career much yet.

“Ten years into your career, you know there’s going to be busy cycles, you know there’s going to be quiet cycles,” Hozier explains with a shrug.

This year obviously wasn’t one of the latter. He’s speaking to Billboard from Perth, Australia, on election night in America — which, with his jet-lagged sleep schedule, means he woke up in the “dark cloud” of Donald Trump’s electoral map takeover. “It feels like the world is controlled by gray-haired old men,” he says, then adds with a bit of mordant humor: “But in a few years… we can’t dodge coffins forever, you know?”

He has just had some rare time off — about three weeks, during which he recharged with friends and family in the countryside of Wicklow, Ireland, that he calls home — and is now between his two dates in Perth, part of a 12-show run Down Under that will take his total gigs for 2024 into the triple digits.Still, he says that when it comes to “Too Sweet,” 2024 hardly compares with his first turn in the pop spotlight. “When it was ‘Take Me to Church,’ that was the first song that I ever put out. So I was learning everything about everything all at once, also while trying to keep pace with this train that was moving,” he explains. “That was my whole life, was catching up with that song.”

Hozier photographed September 19, 2024 at Black Rabbit Rose in Los Angeles.

Austin Hargrave

“Too Sweet,” on the other hand? “It kind of just put wind in the sails of a ship that was already sort of moving,” he says, still sounding unsure of how to best quantify the effect. “It was just like this thing that happened, and it’s been like a cherry on the cake.”

And while Hozier has never seemed one to puff up his own wins, this time his entire team also appears to view the boost from his recent striking success in relatively low-key terms. Caroline Downey, his longtime manager, sums up the impact of “Too Sweet” even more succinctly than the artist himself.

“It was just lovely,” she says. “A lovely surprise.”

Most artists with a single major hit follow a similar trajectory. Hozier, for the last decade, has not.

For one thing, though his lone visit to the Hot 100 in the 2010s was with “Take Me to Church,” he found greater success on other charts. He established a home base on Adult Alternative Airplay, where he scored six top five hits before the end of the decade — including a second No. 1 after “Take Me to Church” with 2018’s Mavis Staples-featuring “Nina Cried Power” — and he topped the Billboard 200 in 2019 with Wasteland, Baby!, which features the latter track.

More importantly, though, he developed a major live following. Hozier has spent his entire career as a road warrior, gradually leveling up in terms of venue size — and earning lifelong fans with his live combination of low-key charisma and soaring singalongs, elevated by his piercing baritone — but making sure not to skip steps, or markets. “I’ve been doing this 25 years, and I don’t know if there’s another artist at the agency that’s played as many markets as Andrew has played,” says WME senior partner/global co-head of music Kirk Sommer, who oversees his North American touring. “He’s just completely and utterly dedicated to his craft and plays each show as if it’s his last. And he’s really put in the work.”

On his 2023 tour in support of new album Unreal Unearth — his third top three entry on the Billboard 200 in as many tries — Hozier started to really see the fruits of that labor with some of his highest-profile venue plays to date, including his first headlining show at New York’s Madison Square Garden. While he has maintained his Adult Alternative audience from the prior decade, he also picked up a new, younger one on TikTok during the global coronavirus shutdown; they fell for the rock star’s modest Irish countryside lifestyle as much as his poetic lyrics and spirit-­lifting anthems.

“The fans seem to really enjoy that… I guess, like, domestic, sort of silly side of me?” he offers, somewhat incredulously. “During the pandemic, we’d do these kind of live readings on Instagram — I’d maybe read a few poems, or we’d do these Instagram Lives, play a few songs. I think maybe there’s a sort of lasting relationship that [makes it feel] like there’s an element of domesticity to me? And that’s why people are like, ‘Hey, talk to us about the bees that you’re keeping in your garden.’ ”

Hozier photographed September 19, 2024 at Black Rabbit Rose in Los Angeles.

Austin Hargrave

While Hozier grew to an arena-level headliner and a TikTok sensation, his mainstream profile remained relatively low. Pop crossover was not a priority of his — “I was always wary of attempting to write hits for the sake of writing hits,” he says — and he has never been much of a critics’ darling or a Grammy favorite. (“Take Me to Church” scored a song of the year nod, but he hasn’t been nominated since; “Too Sweet” was snubbed for the 2025 awards.) Consequently, his sustained level of success escaped the notice of some less-plugged-in fans and media.

“We did have one interview he was doing at [a festival] where the interviewer said — I think [Hozier] nearly choked on his coffee — ‘Where have you been for 10 years?’ ” Downey recalls. “You’re going, “He’s about to close the festival tonight. He’s kind of been around…’ ”

Even before “Too Sweet,” though, Hozier’s rising success was increasingly evident — and his influence on a new generation of rootsy, big-voiced singer-songwriters equally hard to miss. In late 2023, he appeared on a new version of Noah Kahan’s Stick Season opener “Northern Attitude” — which not only returned Hozier to the Hot 100’s top 40 (at No. 37) for the first time since 2014, but contextualized him as a key influence on Kahan’s brand of alt-folk and as one of the artists who had laid the groundwork for the latter’s crossover success. And just days before the release of “Too Sweet,” Lollapalooza announced that Hozier would headline the August festival — his highest-profile bill-topping appearance to that point.

“I was like, ‘Well, how is this gonna go?’ ” Sommer says of checking out his client’s ultimately successful headliner turn in Chicago. “How’s it gonna go? There are gonna be people for as far as the eye can see!”

Meanwhile, Hozier was (perhaps unwittingly) developing an increasingly devoted corner of his fan base. The affection held for him in the lesbian community has already been a source of internet incredulity for years — “Why Do Lesbians Love Hozier?” blog explorations date back to the turn of the 2020s — though the conversation went overground this year when Lucy Dacus told The New York Times: “Lesbians love Hozier.” (Hozier, an outspoken LGBTQ+ ally, calls his support in the community “really, really wonderful, really sweet… there’s a lot of humor in it, too, and a lot of self-awareness.”)

Because Hozier’s career momentum was already trending in a positive direction, the success of “Too Sweet” can be interpreted as not just an effect, but also a cause of his recent revival. “The song, I think, is very special — it really connected with people on a lot of levels — so that is a part of [its success],” says Erika Alfredson, head of marketing at Columbia. “But it’s also a little bit of the market [being more open to him] and also a lot of the work that Andrew has done. And I think it very well could have happened with another song of his. This just happened to be the one.”

This helps explain why Hozier and his team are reserved about the impact “Too Sweet” has had on his career. Before the song’s March release, his 2024 tour dates (announced in January) had already sold out — even with its ambitious 100-plus-date routing that included three nights at the Kia Forum in Inglewood, Calif., and an unprecedented four nights at New York’s Forest Hills Stadium.

All of this adds up to “Too Sweet,” one of 2024’s biggest hits by just about any metric, essentially amounting to a nonessential luxury for Hozier. While the song’s success — which it achieved much quicker than the slow-burning smash that was “Take Me to Church” — has bowled over Hozier and his team, they’re hard-pressed to cite significant doors the song has opened for the already massive star.

Hozier does point to recent appearances on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert and at the iHeart Radio Festival as two particular opportunities that “Too Sweet” may have made possible. But anyway, he says, his calendar was so packed this year that it might have been difficult for him to take advantage of more than that: “Because the tour schedule was already in place when that song blew up, [you’re still] fulfilling everything that you were planning on doing anyway. Your routing is done. So even when you get those invites, it can be a challenge.”

“Does it change [anything]?” Downey wonders aloud when reflecting on the song’s impact. “I guess it just reminds people that he’s there.”

Since it has worked so well for him so far, could Hozier just follow this career path indefinitely — plugging away as a live favorite, coming back with one gigantic pop smash every 10 years and then returning to business as usual?

“I mean, it’d be fun to be 44 and have a No. 1 hit! It’d be fun to be 54, to be 64… Can you guarantee me the No. 1 when I’m in my 80s?” he asks excitedly in response to the idea. “I’m going to be doing whatever I can to stay alive, man. I’m going to be hiring people to be doing all the weird blood transfusions, [to] hook me up to whatever machine.”

Regardless of whether he can still top the Hot 100 when he’s of retirement age, the plan from day one — which his team has enacted brilliantly over the past decade — was to have Hozier achieve the kind of long-term career stability where he could still be performing at a high level as a sexagenarian.

“ ‘We see you as a Bruce Springsteen — we see you as an artist who’ll still be releasing albums long after I’m gone,’ ” Downey remembers telling Hozier very early in his career. “He’s 34 years of age. We want to see him still working like U2 and Bruce Springsteen and a whole lot of other acts at 64. And the only way that I feel that he can do that is by pacing it. And actually not making decisions based on money and making decisions that are right for his long-term career, not his short-term.”

Hozier photographed September 19, 2024 at Black Rabbit Rose in Los Angeles.

Austin Hargrave

And while “Too Sweet” might not have had much calculable immediate career impact for 2024 Hozier, it might very well move him closer to that long-term goal. Sommer has noted how Hozier’s social media and streaming stats have spiked since his “Too Sweet” success: between 1 million and 2 million new followers each on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, as well as an additional 30 million followers on Spotify. Those numbers indicated increased fan demand that could turbo-charge Hozier’s already-scorching live success.

“All those [2024] shows sold out instantly,” Sommer emphasizes. “So how much demand was there? How many people were unable to buy tickets at the time? And we really didn’t get carried away anywhere. We didn’t try to exhaust demand anywhere. So I would say that there was still pent-up demand after the March on-sale. And now we have this song…”

All of this has led Sommer to a conclusion that might stun any remaining listeners unaware of Hozier’s recent level-up — and maybe even a few who are: “I’m incredibly confident [that] he’s a stadium-level headliner.”

That may seem like a big leap for Hozier, who has never played a full arena tour in the United States — but Sommer doesn’t see it that way. “A lot of these amphitheaters are bigger than a lot of these indoor buildings,” he says. “You look at the [four nights at] Forest Hills… what’s that, 60,000 tickets? And it could’ve been more? We chose to play some select arenas in places just because we felt that it might be a better fan experience, and [Hozier is] very mindful of the fan experience. So by no means would this be skipping steps in any way.”

Downey says that the current live plan for Hozier (following his Dec. 21 appearance as musical guest on Saturday Night Live, his first since 2014) is to go back on the road next year, “kind of maybe May to October,” including some major festival headlining gigs, with dates to be announced soon. His own upcoming dates aren’t likely to be stadiums, but Downey agrees those are in his future. “I think that stadiums will definitely be on album four,” she says. “And I do think he’s ready… the slow burn, with the 10 years of him touring, has been from starting him small and gradually building and building and building, that he is perfectly comfortable now in arenas, and he’s perfectly comfortable playing to 40, 50,000 people in a field. So a stadium would be just the next step, I think. With ease.”

Hozier allows himself another rare moment of being pumped about his success when discussing this recent run of momentum — capped, if not created, by “Too Sweet” — and “the ambitious feeling of opportunity” that comes with following it up with all eyes once again upon him. “I can do ­whatever I want. I can do something totally different, I can respond to [“Too Sweet”] with something else, or something different… it’s nice,” he says. “It just feels like the sky is open, and ‘Off you go.’ ”

This story appears in the Dec. 14, 2024, issue of Billboard.