Hozier is about to release new music! "Nina Cried Power" drops next Friday, September 6.
Hozier, the Irish singer-songwriter whose anthem "Take Me to Church" took the world by storm in 2014, has announced that he's releasing his long-awaited new music next week.
A four-song EP titled "Nina Cried Power" will debut September 6, with a full (and as yet untitled) second album slated for release in early 2019.
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The announcement comes ahead of three hometown Dublin gigs Hozier will be playing on September 3, 5, 7, before launching into a North America tour that kicks off September 15 in Ottawa, Ontario, and concludes October 22 in Vancouver, BC, with stops in Chicago, New York, Boston, DC, Los Angeles, Austin, Seattle, and more along the way.
Hozier, full name Andrew Hozier Byrne, shot to fame with two EPs - 2013's "Take Me to Church" and 2014's "From Eden", featuring songs originally recorded in his parents' attic.
The 28-year-old Bray, Co. Wicklow native then released his first self-titled full album in Fall 2014 and embarked on a whirlwind worldwide tour, earning a Grammy nomination, Billboard chart-toppers, and a Saturday Night Live appearance along the way.
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His only new release since then was 2016's "Better Love," part of the "Legend of Tarzan" soundtrack.
As Hozier shares in a new interview with Rolling Stone, he was unable to write new music while touring, so it wasn't until he got off the road in early 2017 that he was able to dive into creating new songs.
And, as one might imagine given how the world has changed since his first album, Hozier's new songs are socially charged and politically influenced. The title track, a "song about protest songs" is an ode to Nina Simone, Marin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, and Mavis Staples - who even recorded a guest verse for the song.
Hozier has never shied away from making statements with his music, choosing to center the video for "Take Me to Church," which already tackled church-fueled shaming, on LGBT repression and violence in Russia, and the video for "Cherry Wine" on domestic violence, with support from Saoirse Ronan. He recently performed as part of the Stand For Truth papal rally in Dublin's Phoenix Park, the counter event to Pope Francis' mass.
Here's what we know about the other new songs, per Rolling Stone:
This sense of impending doom filtered into many of the new songs Hozier wrote, including the moody “NFWMB,” which appears on the EP. Though, as the musician explains, rather than speaking to fear of an impending apocalypse, songs like the acoustic “Wasteland, Baby” and No Plan,” a disco-y stomper inspired by physicist Lawrence M. Krauss’ belief that we should rejoice at being so lucky to even have this relatively brief moment on Earth, are about greeting the chaos with a laugh and a shrug. “It’s like, ‘Well, here the fuck we are,'” he says with a smirk.
September 6 will be a day of rejoicing!
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