On March 16, Irish singer and songwriter Hozier announced the release of his new EP, “Eat Your Young,” and his Unreal Unearth tour. The EP is a teaser for Hozier’s forthcoming album “Unreal Unearth,” set to be released later this year, reports NPR. The album was written during the early stages of the pandemic, and takes inspiration from the classic literature he was reading at the time — in particular the literary canon’s most famous self-insert fanfiction, Dante Alighieri’s “The Divine Comedy,” as well as Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.”
The EP’s titular first track, “Eat Your Young,” takes inspiration from Dante’s descent to the Third Circle of Hell, representing the cardinal sin of excess: gluttony.
The song opens with a few measures of vocalizations and a punchy beat, bare piano chords and string accompaniment underneath, building up to the longing lyrics that follow: “I’m starvin’, darlin’/Let me put my lips to something/Let me wrap my teeth around the world.”
The opening verse and pre-chorus describe an epicurean feast, the singer’s words blending together lust and hunger, two sides of the song’s appetite.
The song’s bouncy melody immediately makes one want to sing along, but in the chorus, Hozier’s lyrics take a sharp turn: “Come and get some / Skinnin’ the children for a war drum / Puttin’ food on the table sellin’ bombs and guns / It’s quicker and easier to eat your young.”
The disconcerting words, according to Genius, may be a reference to Anglo-Irish author Dr. Jonathan Swift’s 1793 satirical essay, “A Modest Proposal,” which floats the idea of solving 18th century Ireland’s poverty crisis by eating the children of poor beggars — only further adding to Hozier’s ostentatious use of literary references. We get it — he writes incredible music and reads.
In an interview with People magazine, Hozier described “Eat Your Young” as “playful … thinking about destructive mindsets, and trying to write from the perspective in, a fun way of an unreliable narrator — somebody who relishes in the idea of just taking what they can take, destroying what they can destroy, damn the expense.”
In the same interview, the singer-songwriter describes the EP’s second track, “All Things End” as, “a heretical statement,” that is “about a breakup, I suppose, which always seems like heresy at the time.” The singer might be winking at Dante’s Sixth Circle of Hell, where those who defy cultural norms are condemned to spend eternity locked in burning tombs.
“All Things End” is a bluesy, darkly optimistic ballad about grieving the end of a relationship that felt eternal, despite the inevitable fact that all things end. But the song holds no bitterness for the leaving partner; as Hozier sings, “[w]e didn’t get it right but, love, we did our best.”
In a culture that sees love as the main purpose of one’s life, the idea of leaving a mostly-content relationship in pursuit of personal growth is heretical. The first half of the chorus is enough to send the listener into an existential crisis about this dissonance, as Hozier sings: “all things end / All that we intend is scrawled in sand / And slips right through our hands.”
Ultimately, the message of “All Things End” is fully realized in the final chorus, through a dramatic key change and the entrance of a heavenly choir, reminding the audience that it is possible to leave one relationship with your hope for the future still intact.
The third and final track of the EP, “Through Me (The Flood),” is a complicated one. Both a love song and an early reflection on the COVID-19 pandemic, Hozier acknowledges resilience as well as profound loss, showing how the relationship between both feelings is symbiotic. Through the image of a man surrendering in the face of a wave he knows “he will not weather,” the song reflects on the immeasurable depth of tragedy — the pandemic, in this case, flooding the world — as well as that of the feelings for his loved one.
Unlike the previous two tracks, “Through Me (The Flood)” takes inspiration from Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” referencing the myth of the “Great Flood,” The song’s opening is evocative of a church sermon, between the recounting of the Flood Myth — known as the Genesis flood narrative in the Christian Bible — and a distorted, electronic organ playing softly underneath. The tempo slowly builds as the pre-chorus introduces percussion, before a drum fill unleashes the chorus into full swing. Hozier belts: “Anytime I’d struggled on/Against the course out on my own/Every time I’d burn through the world, I’d see/That the world, it burns through me. ” In Hozier’s world, fate is a mandate: the only way to live in this world is to become one with its current.
“Eat Your Young” is perhaps Hozier’s most salient release to date, at home in a stunning balance between hope and heartbreak. His upcoming full album, “Unreal Unearth,” is easily one of the most anticipated releases of 2023, at least in my book; I’m excited to see what circles of hell Andrew decides to explore next.
