Hozier is back, and he’s brought a choir with him.
It’s been a minute since Take Me to Church turned Andrew Hozier-Byrne into a global phenomenon, but he’s finally returned with Nina Cried Power, a thunderous, gospel-soaked protest song that doubles as a love letter to the artists who came before him. “I just wanted to write something hopeful,” he says, “something that lacked cynicism.”
That might sound like a quaint mission statement, but in an era where cynicism sells, it’s almost radical. The song, which name-checks Nina Simone, Mavis Staples, James Brown, and other voices of resistance, isn’t just an homage—it’s a rallying cry. “It felt like the world was swinging toward fear and suspicion,” he says. “I wanted to acknowledge the artists who spoke honestly about their time, especially those who lived through far harder circumstances.”
One of those artists is on the song itself. Mavis Staples—genuine legend, civil rights movement soundtrack staple—lends her unmistakable voice to the track. “Having Mavis on it was just… insane,” Hozier says, still a little shell-shocked. “She’s the warmest, kindest person. And yeah, she did tell stories. She talked about Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell, the first time she saw them perform.” He laughs. “It was unreal.”
It’s been four years since Hozier’s self-titled debut album, and he’s spent most of that time either on the road or deep in hiding. “I kind of Hermited myself away,” he admits. After two years of relentless touring, he retreated to the Irish countryside, put down his guitar for a bit, and tried to find normalcy. “I reconnected with my family, spent time alone. I needed that decompression.”
But even isolation couldn’t keep the songs from coming. “I had a ton of little voice memos, scraps of ideas,” he says. “Then, around mid-2017, they just started falling into place.” The result is Nina Cried Power, a four-song EP that serves as both a preview of his upcoming album and a reintroduction to the artist he’s becoming.
One of the standout tracks? The memorably titled NFWMB—short for Nothing F*s With My Baby—which he calls “a love song for the end of the world.” The song draws inspiration from W.B. Yeats’ The Second Coming, a poem that envisions apocalypse with eerie clarity. “The world’s falling apart, but the person you love is unfazed,” he explains. “There’s something terrifying about that.”
But despite all the doom and gloom, Hozier is surprisingly optimistic. “I wanted this record to be about movement, about things changing, about hope,” he says. And he means it literally—his next single is titled Movement, and according to him, it’s one of his favorites. “We’ve been sneaking it into the live set, and it just feels right,” he says.
In the meantime, he’s easing back into public life—one sold-out show at a time. “Being back onstage feels like a homecoming,” he says. “It’s weird how natural it is. Like I never left.”
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below!
