On Saint Patrick’s Day of all days, Irish singer-songwriter Hozier released a long-awaited EP.
This release date was about four years from his most recent full-length album. While a single entitled “Swan Upon Leda” dropped in 2022, Hozier remained quiet between projects. Needless to say, this made fans restless, and Hozier’s recent series of announcements quite an uproar.
Not only did Hozier announce his EP entitled “Eat Your Young,” but he announced that the songs on the EP will be included in an album to be released by the end of the year. As if that weren’t enough, Hozier also announced his global “Unreal Unearth Tour 2023.”
This long break between work is something that we don’t often see in the world of chart-topping musical artists. While, as a fan, it is frustrating not to receive more content quickly, I have grown to appreciate this long break. Artists can easily force themselves to create content faster for more money or fame. Often this leads to the quality of their work being lower because they’re burnt out and writing for gain instead of for art. Instead of falling into this trap, Hozier allowed four years to pour into this new album.
“Eat Your Young” included three songs that will eventually be on the upcoming album. The EP consists of the title track, as well as “All Things End” and “Through Me (The Flood).”
The title track, “Eat Your Young,” starts with a disturbing title and a poetic punch. Once we get past the impact of the title, the lyrics take some serious analysis to unpack. Hozier is known for his lyrics, which are more like poetry than song lyrics. “Eat Your Young” is just the same.
While Hozier has never made any direct statements about the meanings of some of these songs, lyrical analysis can help us get there. The phrase eat your young is an idiom meaning neglecting or mistreating those in a lower position than you. Not only that, but the lyrics seem to heavily allude to an Irish piece of satire called “A Modest Proposal” that suggests children of poor Irish families be sold to Englishmen and eaten to avoid them being a financial burden. “A Modest Proposal” was written after the English colonization of Ireland as a sarcastic jab at the English. One of Hozier’s lyrics is “seven new ways that you can eat your young.” In the context of the idiom, this lyric is saying, “seven new ways that you can oppress.”
The meaning deepens when someone is familiar with “A Modest Proposal,” where the author wrote six possible ways to eat your young. This proposal was meant to be outrageous and highlight the horror of English oppression and their starvation tactics against the Irish.
The addition of the seventh adds a religious element, as in Jewish and Christian tradition, the number seven is the number of completion and fulfillment. This addition from Hozier nods at the religious motivations that pushed England to colonize and the religious reasoning that has continued to perpetuate oppression. This interpretation is strengthened by Hozier’s choice to release the EP on St. Patrick’s Day.
This EP brings back some gospel influence previously seen in Hozier songs like “Nina Cried Power.” The genre of gospel adds unique elements to the EP as well. Gospel’s roots are in liberation songs, and the use of this genre adds a lot of thematic significance to the tracks. Not to mention that it sounds incredible with the melody line of “All Things End.”
“All Things End” is a bright spot after the heaviness of “Eat Your Young.” While the title may not imply this, the lyrics are rather hopeful, saying, “just knowing that everything will end should not change our plans when we begin again.”
The final track, “Through Me (The Flood),” tells a story through what I would argue are some of Hozier’s most beautiful lyrics of his career. The story tells of a man standing against the world and realizing the toll on him, eventually ending up in the grave. The pronouns change from a third-person narrative to first-person, saying, “Every time I’d burn through the world, I’d see that the world— it burns through me.”
These songs intersect each other with themes and feelings that they enact and form an incredible EP. It may have taken four years, but if the rest of the album is like these three songs, it will have been worth the wait.