Unheard

UNHEARD: FOUR SONGS DANTE NEVER CLAIMED

Hozier’s Unheard EP (2024) arrives not as a stopgap but as a deliberate excavation — four tracks from the Unreal Unearth sessions that refused to be quietly archived. Released on March 22, 2024, through Rubyworks Records and Columbia Records, the EP carries more commercial weight than most full-length albums manage in a calendar year, largely because its lead track “Too Sweet” rewrote Irish chart history by landing Hozier at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 — the first Irish act to do so since Sinéad O’Connor in 1990. What makes Unheard worth examining closely, beyond the numbers, is what it reveals about the creative economy of a songwriter who builds thematic ecosystems and then has to decide, with surgical discipline, which pieces don’t make the final structure. These four songs didn’t survive the edit for Unreal Unearth. That they still function — some of them brilliantly — is its own argument.

Production Palette: Blues Architecture in a Short Form

The four tracks on Unheard were recorded for Hozier’s third studio album Unreal Unearth (2023) but did not make the final tracklist.
That origin story is embedded in the music’s DNA: every arrangement here shares the same analog warmth, the same reverb-treated vocal chamber, and the same preference for organic rhythm section dynamics that characterized the parent record.
Allison Russell, who features on “Wildflower and Barley,” described recording the track as “our first time in the studio together,” and noted that Hozier and his co-producer Jeff Gitty “were an absolute delight to work with,” offering what she called a master class in “the subtleties of vintage mics, plate reverb and sonic exploration.”
That production philosophy — vintage signal chain, deliberate use of room ambience, plate reverb as texture rather than effect — runs through all four tracks here and gives the EP its coherence despite the brevity of the format.

“Too Sweet” is the clearest demonstration of how Hozier and Gitty calibrate a pop-adjacent arrangement without abandoning the tonal grammar of blues.
Racket Magazine specifically lauded “Too Sweet” for its “atmospheric bells and punchy basslines,”
and that combination — a high-register melodic hook sitting above a low-end anchor — creates the kind of tonal contrast that gives a relatively sparse production its sense of movement. The track’s tonal center sits in a mixolydian-adjacent space, the flatted seventh softening the chord resolutions and giving the whole thing a languorous quality that suits the lyrical conceit of nocturnal pleasures. “Wildflower and Barley” operates at a slower metabolic rate: mandolin-adjacent fingerpicking, two voices trading lines in a folk-R&B register that owes something to the Americana tradition without ever being classifiable as such. “Empire Now” brings the most rhythmic tension of the four, the drum pattern carrying a march-like insistence that the guitar work consistently pushes against.
Racket Magazine critiqued “Fare Well” as a reverb-heavy “weird hippie-sounding downer” that feels overly abstract,
and while that characterization is harsh, it points to something real: the fourth track leans further into atmosphere than structure, and without the forward momentum of the preceding three tracks, it can feel like the exhale after the conversation rather than a full contribution to it.

For listeners who want to trace the lineage of this folk-meets-blues production sensibility into adjacent territory, Wasia Project’s Isotope (2024) offers an interesting point of comparison — similarly organic in its construction, similarly interested in what happens when intimacy is treated as an arrangement principle rather than a mood.

Songwriting and Voice: The Privilege of the Outtake

There is a particular quality that the best outtakes share: they feel simultaneously finished and unburdened, as though the creative pressure of album coherence has been lifted and what remains is just the song itself. Unheard operates inside that logic.
Hozier himself framed the four songs as ones that “might’ve made it to the circles of gluttony, limbo, violence and the outward ‘ascent'” — each corresponding to a section of Dante’s Inferno, the organizing principle of Unreal Unearth — but which “did not appear on the album for different reasons.”
That framework matters for understanding why the EP’s songwriting feels the way it does: these are not sketches or demos. They are fully realized compositions that simply didn’t fit the specific dramatic arc Hozier had architected for the parent album.

“Too Sweet” is the most commercially legible track on the EP, and its lyrical mechanism is worth examining on its own terms.
The song positions Hozier as someone meeting the “rhythm of a true night owl,” sipping whiskey and drinking black coffee — a narrator in conversation with a partner whose preferences run toward healthier habits. While she leads a consciously healthier lifestyle, he leans into life’s various “pleasures,” justifying the contrast by noting that she is “already too sweet.” The song further explores how differences can evolve and compound within a relationship.
It’s an elegant lyrical inversion — where the usual romantic framework would demand convergence, Hozier uses divergence as the expression of affection. The wit in the writing is underplayed, which is where most of its charm lives. The narrator isn’t defending himself; he’s expressing something closer to admiration from a distance.

“Wildflower and Barley,” the duet with Allison Russell, operates in a different emotional register entirely.
The track has been described as a standout that showcases both artists’ strengths in folk-R&B fusion
, and the pairing is notable for how little it relies on dynamic contrast between the two voices — they don’t compete, they orbit each other, which creates a sense of stillness at the center of what is actually a deeply textured arrangement. “Empire Now” is the closest the EP gets to direct political commentary, though Hozier’s approach, as ever, is oblique — more concerned with the psychology of power and complicity than with any particular target. And “Fare Well,” the closing track, wraps the EP in the kind of ambivalence that characterizes the best of his writing: neither triumphant nor defeatist, but sitting in the complicated middle ground where most honest emotional writing lives.

Vocally, Hozier is in precisely the register that his audience has calibrated to over a decade — that particular chest-voice-dominant delivery that sits between a folk tenor and a blues baritone, capable of considerable force but almost always choosing restraint. On “Wildflower and Barley,” that restraint reads as genuine respect for his collaborator, and it makes the track feel less like a feature and more like a real duet in the traditional sense of the form.