Anytime Anywhere: Hozier Sells Out Sheds & Arenas (Cover Story)

Hozier wasn’t ready for it.

When the Irish singer-songwriter — real name Andrew Hozier-Byrne — took the stage at São Paulo’s Autódromo de Interlagos for Lollapalooza Brazil on March 23, he couldn’t have possibly predicted what would happen.

It was his first-ever performance in the country, which, like its South American neighbors, has a reputation for ebullient, enthusiastic, excited concert crowds. That, he was ready for, to the extent anyone can be.

But when the crowd started chanting for his song “Too Sweet,” he was caught off guard.

Not included on his critically and commercially successful 2023 album Unreal Unearth, it was a non-album single that had been released the day before. 

How could all of these people know the song, let alone already love it enough to chant for him to play it?

“We hadn’t even rehearsed it,” he tells Pollstar. 

He looked, perhaps forlornly, perhaps hopefully, at his nine-piece band, who at best stared back blankly and may have even given a subtle shake of the head. At worst, they may have mouthed “Hell no.” 

How could they do the song the justice the people deserved off the cuff with no preparation? Hozier and his band had to pass.

“Still, that was enjoyable,” he says.

Hozier did get a good singalong during the set, letting festivalgoers handle the vocals on “Work Song.”

Which brings us back to “Too Sweet.” It’s now hit the top of the charts in several countries, including the U.S. and the U.K.; its catchy R&B-soul-folk-country amalgam caught fire in the summer in the way songs do. But like a celebrity baby, it was famous before it was born. A snippet of its chorus was included in a podcast before its March release. Hozier’s label, Columbia, successfully had it taken down, but nothing disappears on the internet. Its brief existence in the wild was enough for that clip to be pastiched, lip-synced, danced to, edited and whatever the heck else happens to songs when they cross into the TikTok multiverse.

And so it became Hozier’s most successful song since his debut single “Take Me To Church,” which launched him into the consciousness a decade ago (with some viral momentum, its stark video a hit thanks in part to being shared by actor Stephen Fry; it also had streams driven by a statistically-significant number of Shazam inquiries).

It’s an interesting thing to have a sort of unexpected hit while already on tour, while already on a successful tour at that.

Hozier’s been on the road virtually constantly for more than a year, beginning with a handful of underplays — “Just to say, ‘Hi’ again,” he says — starting with four shows at The Academy in Dublin and following up with similar small club performances in London, Berlin and Atlanta in April 2023. He followed that with larger clubs on both sides of the Atlantic — and a June 30, 2023, special performance at Malahide Castle in Dublin that drew 24,850 people and grossed $1,401,401, according to Pollstar Boxoffice reports. 

The rooms got bigger and the crowds kept pace, and this was all before the new album was on the streets in August. 

When the album did hit, Hozier’s agent, WME partner and global co-head of music Kirk Sommer, had a plan. And that plan was similar to what his plan had been for Hozier since his breakthrough in 2014, when Sommer brought him to the U.S. having been introduced to the singer via his manager, Caroline Downey, a long-time Irish promoter who had the good fortune of having children in school with a teenaged Hozier. 

“The strategy is deep market penetration. I’ve been doing this 24 years and as a co-head, I don’t know if we’ve worked with another artist who played as many markets as Andrew played,” he says. “It looks like a Picasso if you put it on a map. The wave across the country, east to west, selling out. … We never got carried away with our expectations; we were just trying to do the right thing.”

That’s a sentiment Downey says has always driven the vision for Hozier’s career, ever since she heard him play a “a stripped-down” Bee Gees cover at the school talent show all those years ago.

“It’s about doing right by him and developing him as a long-term artist,” she says. “We always viewed him as a long-term artist with the idea his music would be around a long, long time.”

That run of large amphitheaters with a few arenas, depending on the market, interpolated with festivals, ran from September to November, and Sommer isn’t exaggerating. It was indeed an east to west conquest: 9,240 at Huntington Bank Pavilion in Chicago; 16,052 at Toronto’s Budweiser Stage. A sellout at Madison Square Garden. Two Red Rocks sellouts. Arenas sold out in Portland and Vancouver. In fact, even from his tiniest club days — Hozier has never played as direct support — he has always sold out, according to Downey, who preferred, in his early days, that he play to “50 or 100 of his own fans,” rather than try to capture the attention of people who came to see someone else.

“That run culminated at the Hollywood Bowl on the weekend,” Sommer says (the concert grossed more than $1.3 million on 17,353 tickets). “A beautiful show. From there, we kinda knew a bit more about what we had and the level of interest. All the metrics were arrows up, streaming was healthy, the album was incredible. We put together a much larger tour — it went back to the last cycle, except it’s major sheds and arenas, but it’s the same kind of thing. We had to weave around the radius clauses and that started in the spring 2024. Again: Deep market penetration.”

All of this success on the back of a record, like so many that hit shelves in 2022 and 2023, crafted in the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic. Unreal Unearth grapples with loneliness and separateness and does so in the thematic framework of the “Inferno,” Dante’s epic poem about a journey through hell, the album’s tracks corresponding to the different levels of the underworld. 

On its face, it’s not a concept that would seem to lend itself to hands-in-the-air, full-throat singing fans and teeming festival crowds. And yet …

“Some pieces of music written in that time definitely reflect that sense of isolation and quiet and that sense of awayness and distance,” Hozier says. “That can be challenging in an open field of 45,000 to get across.”

But he does it, and he does it with thoughtfulness, too. Some of his songs work better in twilight or darkness. He’s currently doing a round of festivals and other outdoor plays in Ireland and the U.K., though.

“We have full daylight until 10:30 p.m. We have to cater the set depending on what that looks like. The album was broad enough to choose and we still get intimate moments once the sun finally sets,” he says.

Unreal Unearth was driving ticket sales even without “Too Sweet,” which Hozier said didn’t make the cut because of the unique structure of the album and it shared a deadly sin with another track.

‘Too Sweet’ fell into gluttony and it had to go head-to-head with ‘Eat Your Young.’ Those were contending for that spot and ‘Eat Your Young’ clinched it. It felt more complex and darker themed and that’s what drew me to it, but I was also enjoying ‘Too Sweet’ and it was catchy and lighthearted comparatively. … I wanted to share it after the fact. It deserved a chance in the world,” he says.

And the world loved it. But here’s what’s interesting: all those tickets he’s sold — Sommer says probably “a million on this cycle” — were almost all sold before anyone knew what “Too Sweet” was. The latest U.S. leg began in April, after the South America festival season, but went on sale in November 2023.

“It’s not every day you blow out Cleveland, Tampa, Raleigh, The Gorge on an onsale,” Sommer says. “Now we have the monster multiformat hit. What are we gonna do? Where are we gonna go? It remains to be seen.”

To end the successful U.S. leg, Sommer was looking for another tentpole; he revels in crafting a big moment for each tour. Hozier — a classic example of an artist following the steps — had his first big moment at a church in Austin during 2014’s South by Southwest, perfect for an Irish artist with the soul of a poet, who like so many of his countrymen, writes songs that explore the tension in the sacred and profane. The latest album is based on the “Inferno,” for heaven’s (or hell’s) sake. 

A club tour included five plays at the Hammerstein Ballroom. There’s the time he played the Ryman Auditorium three times, coinciding with his birthday and St. Patrick’s Day (which happen to be the same). He finished another run selling out Red Rocks. He capped a run at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. He did the Bowl. All big sorts of eventized moments. Sommer went looking for another.

“Forest Hills felt like the right move. The question is, is it three or four or five?,” Sommer says. The team started with two dates for the tour announcement, adding two more later. “We lined those days up and that’s where that leg finished. Almost 60,000 tickets. We found out that was a 101-year-old record we broke.”

Hozier was the first artist to ever sell out four consecutive shows at the stadium in Queens.

“He opened with ‘Too Sweet,’” Sommer says. “Everyone had their phone in the air.”

It’s not lost on Hozier that things keep getting bigger. 

“We’re playing to arenas more consistently and it’s the largest crowds of my own ticketed shows. We did 45,000 in London, which was a big deal to me. I’m trying to take stock of that, and those nights in New York,” he says.

Sommer says in the early days, Hozier shows were full of deeply appreciative, technique obsessives — “the muso thing,” he calls it — who would listen so intently at live performances “you could hear a pin drop.”

It’s a little different at a Hozier show now.

“The reality is today with the increased streams and radio success, some of the audience has become shriekers: a younger demo that lets out a piercing shriek,” he said. Early in Hozier’s career, Sommer’s parents attended his shows (and loved it).

“But now our children’s friends are his biggest fans,” he says. “We’ve seen these things happen with Amy Winehouse, Sam Smith, The Killers, when the song is everywhere. I couldn’t be happier for him and the team. Good things happen to good people and he and the team have certainly earned it.”

Downey said the shift to a younger audience was apparent from those early underplays, driven (obviously) not by “Two Sweet,” but by the frequent emergence of Hozier’s songs on TikTok and other social platforms.

“Before ‘Too Sweet’ came out – we noticed a switch in the age of his fans. When we did underplays first, we were noticing the audience was in their 20s,” she said. “There were lots of viral moments on TikTok and that switched on people listening to his music. … The surprise has not been to his fans; it’s an industry surprise.”

Hozier’s wrapping the European festival season, monitoring civil twilight times for a few weeks more while he makes his set lists (which, of course, include “Too Sweet” now, he and the band having perfected it).

He’ll get some time off to go back to Ireland, to “live woods adjacent,” as he tells Pollstar, for a bit. Then there are more U.S. dates, more than two dozen of them. And yes, it ends with a big moment: three shows at Inglewood, California’s Kia Forum. But the arena and shed run includes a lot of off-the-beaten-path stops too: Bangor, Maine; Billings, Montana; Casper, Wyoming.

Sommer’s “deep market penetration” strategy doesn’t stop. It’s the right thing for the artist, he says.

“People appreciate the show and they tell their friends,” he says. “It’s how we used to break bands, putting them everywhere we could. I can’t think of another artist that’s played this many markets.” And they know the songs in all of them.