#hozier interview

🎥: getty images

Source: impact, March 3, 2025

Hozier interview with Raina Douris for World Cafe

The whole interview is well worth a read, but here’s a few highlights

Hozier tactfully addressing the internet lust brigade:

Hozier may find comfort in maintaining a certain level of mystery. Earlier this year, a Spotify user shared a playlist titled submissive men !! that featured four Hozier songs, including “NFWMB,” from his 2018 EP Nina Cried Power. The musician finds his inclusion on the playlist “interesting” and raises his eyebrows at the idea that he might have some songs out serving as theme music for all the subby boys out there.

“I think I’m glad most people don’t know me all that well,” he says. “Sometimes I think the negative space between me and the actual me and fans is filled with very, I think, attractive descriptions of myself or attractive imaginings of myself.”

Hozier on the politics of his music:

That said, he doesn’t want his music used for causes he doesn’t support. “What I’m concerned [with] is if it gets co-opted for something that’s harmful or deliberately harmful,” he says, his voice becoming firmer with his conviction. For as many love songs as Hozier sings, he is equally committed to social justice and calling attention to inequality and oppression. In “Butchered Tongue,” from Unreal Unearth, he highlights the colonialist practice of forcing indigenous peoples to abandon their mother languages. He also directly references pitchcapping, an ancient form of torture famously used by the English to put down the Irish Rebellion of 1798. Pointing out the atrocities of the world is as important to him as declarations of undying love.

“I'm very interested in Irish history, but I find that Irish history– it’s one little microcosm of something that happened across the world, you know what I mean? And so my understanding, the history of my place, where I come from—it informs my understanding of imperialism, of global imperialism, and it informs my understanding of global power structures,” he says. “They’re part of my psychic makeup, just from what I understand of my own country’s history, my own nation’s history. … It colors the lens, as it were, with how I see the world.”

Hozier on fans ignoring the influence of Black artists on his music:

“This is kind of part of the wider thing … I can talk about my influences being of Black artistry. It’s mentioned all the time. It is in the work. It’s literally in the work … and it’s just something that is not taken seriously,” he says.

Black fans have often taken to social media to express their own frustration at how white fans conveniently ignore Hozier’s tributes to Black artists, praising him instead as a ridiculously tall forest elf from a magical land far, far away. But Hozier says it’s natural for him to pay homage, to take care of the work he’s built his own on.