Five years separated Hozier's debut album from Wasteland, Baby!, yet the intervening time did not produce a dramatic reinvention. The gospel voices, blues and soul vocabulary, reverberant production and darkly romantic songwriting that made "Take Me to Church" such an unlikely worldwide hit are all still here. That continuity feels less like caution than evidence that Andrew Hozier-Byrne had already established a remarkably complete musical language on his first attempt.
Beneath the contemporary production, Hozier remains a traditional songwriter. His melodies are carefully constructed, his chord changes carry more weight than the atmospheric surfaces initially suggest, and the songs rarely depend on studio effects to disguise weak foundations. The large drums, distant voices and cavernous reverberation give Wasteland, Baby! its scale, but much of the material would survive without them.
"Nina Cried Power" makes that relationship between tradition and modernity explicit. Mavis Staples brings an immediate connection to gospel and soul history, while the production places those influences inside something much larger and more contemporary. Hozier's voice can move from an intimate murmur to a full, resonant declaration without losing its character, and the choir around him turns the song into a communal performance.
The record repeatedly finds interesting details inside that established sound. "Movement" floats on spacious, almost jazz-like harmonies before growing into something far more imposing. "No Plan" introduces a thick fuzz guitar that cuts through the otherwise polished production, while "Dinner & Diatribes" uses saxophone as an unexpected source of color rather than a decorative flourish.
Those moments matter because Wasteland, Baby! has a real problem with scale. Fourteen songs and nearly an hour of music would be less demanding if the arrangements, tempos and vocal textures changed more radically from one section to another. Instead, the very consistency that makes the album coherent gradually begins to flatten its contours.
Hozier's production aesthetic is powerful in individual songs: pounding drums, broad reverberation, layered voices and relatively sparse arrangements leave his singing plenty of room. Across almost an hour, however, that same vocabulary can make otherwise distinct compositions begin to resemble one another. Songs that work perfectly well in isolation occasionally disappear into the album's larger atmosphere.
That is frustrating precisely because the writing is so assured. Hozier has an ear for melodies that sound immediately familiar without feeling anonymous, and his voice gives even the more restrained material considerable presence. There is a seriousness to the music, but it is grounded in songcraft rather than grand gestures.
A more severe edit might therefore have made Wasteland, Baby! stronger. Removing a few songs would not fundamentally alter its character; it would give the contrasts already present more room to register. "Movement", "No Plan" and "Nina Cried Power" suggest several different directions within Hozier's established style, but the album's length sometimes obscures those distinctions.
Still, this is an accomplished second record from a songwriter who sounds unusually certain of what he wants his music to be. Five years after his debut, Hozier does not abandon the mixture of gospel, blues, soul and modern production that introduced him. He refines it. The next challenge may simply be deciding which ideas deserve to stay.
GENRE: Pop rock
RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2019
PRODUCED BY: Hozier, Markus Dravs, Rob Kirwan & Ariel Rechtshaid
LABEL: Rubyworks / Columbia Records
RATING: 6/10