It would be a bit of an understatement to say that Irish troubadour Hozier has a thing for iconography. Pretty much all his work to date has been colored by a plethora of literary allusions, religious imagery and mythic citations. His 2023 album Unreal Unearth, for instance, was deeply inspired by Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy – a foundational poetic work thats influence on cultural imagination cannot possibly be overstated. The recently released and expanded Unreal Unearth: Unending doubles down on that influence – nowhere more obvious than on the brand new single “Hymn to Virgil.” Contrary to its worshipful title, however, “Hymn to Virgil” is not simply a paean to the ancient poet who served as Dante’s guide through the realms of the damned and the penitent. Rather, “Hymn to Virgil” evokes the name of the Aeneid ‘s bard as the catalyst for an ode on devotion in Hozier’s latest effort at elevating amorous reverence to hallowed stature – a thematic conceit that Dante himself helped to define.
“Hymn to Virgil” mines elements from almost as many musical idioms as its source material did characters from classical myth. It evokes a cavernous yet dense atmosphere thick as an arboreal mist and heavy as six feet of soil, and from that fertile sonic ground springs something that sounds like indie folk gone dark pop gone movie score. Soulful, R&B-esque beats underscore an array of gospel vocals and organ textures that lend the whole affair a sacred air, while some clever vocal processing takes Hozier’s already earthy baritone to even greater depths. The overall effect is reminiscent in many ways of his breakthrough single “Take Me To Church” – fitting for its through line of religious motifs.
Lyrically, Hozier spins a tragedy of romantic fixation. Just as Virgil compelled Dante through the circles of Hell and Purgatory, so too does the object of Hozier’s fixation compel him to follow into abyssal depths. But where Dante’s beloved Beatrice eventually beckoned him on to beatified ground, Hozier’s condemned muse would drive him to forsake paradise in the throes of his infatuation. He resolves that even in the face of the chill of death, “I would burn the world to bring some heat to you” – not only metaphorically striking language, but textually correct seeing as, contrary to common portrayal, Dante’s Inferno in fact skews cold.