Hozier: Unreal Unearth review – turning the emotion up to 11 | Pop and rock

Irish singer-songwriter Andrew Hozier-Byrne’s third album is a lot. A teetering stack of soul and rock teeming with furrow-browed, denim-jacketed, glass-cased emotion. It should come with a reading list – its 16 songs are patterned by way of Dante’s Inferno and he has said that epic poetry such as Metamorphoses inspired him. There’s a great album hiding in here but, like Ovid, Hozier lacks concision. De Selby (Part 1) – named after a Flann O’Brien character – is entrancing, Hozier’s magnificent gale-force voice dialled down to a warming breeze. But what do couplets such as: “Your reflection can’t offer a word / To the bliss of not knowing yourself” mean?

Strengths lie in Eat Your Young’s supple funk, a light-footed take on Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, and the itchy urgency of De Selby (Part 2). There’s a chilling, unforgettable beauty to closing pair Unknown/Nth and First Light. Damage Gets Done has a nice swing to it; All Things End is solidly soulful. The album’s middle, though, sags with gusty, tension-free music, the lyrics gesturing at profundity yet too self-consciously poetic to deliver real poetry. It’s a shame there wasn’t room for Swan Upon Leda, 2022’s thoughtful single about putrid patriarchy in our post-Roe v Wade era.