This is how Hozier resisted the challenge of big fame after “Take Me to Church” and made his best album 10 years later

Sometime in 2013, the little-known Irish singer-songwriter Andrew John Hozier-Byrne, in a sudden creative impulse, recorded a raw demo of the song called “Take Me to Church” in his attic. Some time later, it became a smash hit that catapulted him to stardom. And like other good singers who suddenly became popular with one big hit, he had only two choices: to embrace the new role and become a pop star or to continue doing what he wanted and go with the flow.

As we see on his third studio album, he has chosen the latter and feels very confident in this role. You won’t find new big hits here, but he really knows how to create upbeat, ethereal, and utterly euphoric folk smashers like “De Selby (Part 2)” or “Eat Your Young.” He easily connects folk-ish vulnerable songwriting with funky and poppy production, balancing somewhere in the middle between deep and introspective Fleet Foxes-like croons and, sorry, Coldplay’s stadium choruses (“Damage Gets Done”).

Traditional folk ballads (“I, Carrion (Icarian)”) and indie-folk vignettes (“Anything But”) alternate with ’00s big-hits-like soul offerings (“All Things End”) and highly polished, well-produced synth-filled bangers here. And this odyssey around the nine circles of hell, based on Dante’s Inferno, lasts more than an hour, as it should with magnum opuses. It’s definitely the most versatile and epic of his albums on which he plays by his own rules but still stays in the line of big and notable musicians.