Yes, someone does actually like him!
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Micha Cavaseno: Hozier’s shouty leaps have always ended up echoing a little less storied Elton John for me, although the beginning of this tune had me already worried he’d gone into the “Lean On Me” territory. Lyrically the song is pretty neither here nor there, and I can’t say I’m particularly sold on his voice yet. But the arrangement and orchestration here is completely on point, building slowly and becoming a mass before dropping out sudden. Whereas recent attempts at realmusik by say Ed Sheeran are straightforward safe affairs, and Sam Smith’s are immediate self-gratifying histronic crying face .GIFs, Hozier likes to offer a beginning and an end here. I can’t say he’s going to last long but I hope his peers in this wide-eyed world of UK people trying to save us from the tyranny of pop with the pop of our fathers’ fathers can learn what he does right.
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Alfred Soto: With this ditty’s I-think-it’s-Van-Morrison lick and his fussy, not unfriendly stentorian manner, Andrew Hozier-Byrne smacks of the pulpit. His schtick is to inflate what he thinks are the banalities of silly love songs with gospel sonorities. He can’t leave a tune well enough alone. He’d rather be Bill Withers imagining himself in Carnegie Hall than Bill Withers the workaday strummer, fleshing out “Lean On Me” and “Who Is He And What Is He to You” a syllable at a time. It’s as if his ambition was to be the menace he’s not talented enough to be.
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Brad Shoup: Songwriters, performers, producers: they’ve found their breath of fresh air, and it’s a bellowy Irish dude with covering his crotch with two hands. Here he presents some of the best massed choir singing I’ve heard on a pop record, and he’s singing some ditty from Disney’s Robin Hood. Get your shit together, Hozier!
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Patrick St. Michel: Every year I’ve lived outside of the United States has pushed me a little further away from whatever is popular back home, making events like The Grammy Awards a weird chance to catch up on music (while also seeing what inevitably gets shoved down the throats of the rest of the world — Macklemore is just getting going on this side of the world, thanks a lot Grammys). Based on what I’ve pieced together, Hozier is a polarizing figure, though I’ve really only seen the negative side of that — I’m assuming somebody likes him. After listening to “Someone New” (and “Take Me To Church”) I’m not sure how anyone could bring themselves to align with either extreme. It’s totally OK, pleasant but nothing more. Dude seems full of himself a bit… but most people at that level do, right? I don’t know, maybe I’m not missing much back home.
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Edward Okulicz: Wow, compared to a bunch of other artists plying this sort of Real Soulful Music thing, Hozier sounds measured and subtle, and he doesn’t use his voice to try to WRENCH FEELINGS OUT OF YOU. The song’s actually doing the lifting by itself. Quite clever, though not sure if intended, how the choir seems to suggest the object of his love changes from a person to God before our ears.
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Megan Harrington: I know that someday Hozier, my dark eyed prince of the moors, will be happy. “Someone New” nudges in that direction, bright and catchy on the surface but only to the extent that it shellacs the sadness lurking just beneath. As with “Take Me to Church,” the language of sex and religion are blurred, the thrill of blasphemy seeps into the fracture of heartbreak. But on “Someone New” the strain is evident — the velvety early morning indigo of “Take Me to Church” was an effortless pose for Hozier, but getting over a break up, even in the old-fashioned way, is a shape he has to shake himself to fit. You will always betray yourself pretending toward contentment when you’re still shoulder deep in emotional quicksand, so “Someone New” makes that betrayal the point.
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