“Fans started making videos on TikTok… it skyrocketed” – The Irish Times

In April 1990, a month after Andrew Hozier-Byrne was born, Sinéad O'Connor was number one on the US charts with Nothing Compares 2 U. Thirty-four years later, Hozier himself sits at number one in the United States. It is the first time since O'Connor's smash hit that an Irish artist has received the award.

Hozier's song is called “Too Sweet”, a tune that makes him the fourth Irish artist (O'Connor, U2 twice and Gilbert O'Sullivan) to reach number one on the US charts. Too Sweet also reached number one in Ireland, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand.

Too Sweet was one of the last songs Hozier worked on for his 2023 album Unreal Unearth, a concept album centered around Dante's Inferno's Nine Circles of Hell. Too Sweet was nominated for the “Gluttony” portion of the album, but had competition. Ultimately, another title, “Eat Your Young,” prevailed. Too Sweet ended up on a four-track EP with tracks that didn't make it onto the album, titled Unheard. None of this suggests that Hozier and his team had a number one single on their hands. Serendipity certainly played a role.

On March 6, the How Long Gone podcast released a new episode featuring an interview with Hozier. The EP was played to the people in the room and the podcast episode accidentally included a snippet of Too Sweet. “Everyone immediately panicked,” Niall Muckian told me this week. Muckian is a key figure in Hozier's management team, the founder of Rubyworks Records, and signed Hozier early in his career. After the initial unease that a snippet of the song had entered the public domain, a collective conclusion was reached, which from Muckian's perspective was the feeling: “Ah, look, it's out there now.” Fans noticed excerpt immediately and initially mistook it for another unreleased title, Wildflower and Barley.

[ Hozier: ‘This album was actually more not trying to be the control freak’ ]

“We could see that the number of user-created videos continued to increase leading up to the release day… So we knew there was something going on with the song.”

— Niall Muckian

“Fans started making videos on TikTok,” says Muckian. “It was a happy coincidence.” Normally we wouldn't publish because everything gets deleted at the same time. It was accidentally put in fans' hands and they ran with it.” TikTok was key to the song's growth and ultimately propelled streaming. In this context, there are essentially two audio branches on TikTok; an official song release made available like on any streaming platform, and then user-generated “sounds.” “This was picked up as UGC [user-generated content]“It was the excerpt from the podcast that was used,” says Muckian. It was all very unofficial. It has snowed. We could see that the number of user-created videos continued to increase leading up to the release day… So we knew there was something going on with the song.”

Leaving it up to the fans turned out to be an incredibly smart decision. There was no fancy music video and little marketing to begin with. The EP was released on March 22nd, the song as a single on March 29th. It blew up on all streaming platforms. “Too Sweet” is a catchy tune that doesn’t so much sneak up on the listener as it immediately envelops them. It's an incredibly morose tune with a tune that demands repeat visits: “I take my whiskey straight, my coffee black and my bed at three, you're too sweet for me.” It also features a soft entry point. There's the infectious baseline, Hozier's sassy vocals and a minute later the chorus lands. Game over. How brilliant it is to build a song around concepts of sweetness that the listener ultimately craves.

In the midst of Too Sweet's rise, one of the most anticipated albums of the year was also released on March 29: Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter. To put the extent of “Too Sweet's” listenership into context, Beyoncé's version of Dolly Parton's “Jolene” has racked up around 40 million Spotify streams at the time of writing. Two Sweet has accumulated around 220 million and counting. Too Sweet entered the US Billboard Hot 100 at number five, then number two and then number one.

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It's difficult to convey to audiences in Ireland how big Hozier is in the United States. He is on the second leg of a US tour, playing major venues in North Carolina, Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas, Florida, Virginia, Maryland, Maine, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Oklahoma, Missouri, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado , Utah, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, California. In June he will play four nights in New York at Forest Hills Stadium, home of the US Open. “It's not an east-west coastal tour,” Muckian says of the schedule, “it's all America. It's the old-fashioned way U2 would have done it.” Last year, Hozier played on another 27-part US tour for the first time at Madison Square Garden in New York City, a gig I attended and was struck by the intensity of the fandom, the deafening screams almost lifting the roof off the well-known venue.

Hozier expressed his gratitude on social media. “It's absolutely mind-blowing,” he said in a recent video, “I'm completely surprised.” In an industry characterized by colossal marketing campaigns, playlist chicanery and a long-tail social media strategy, success is by Too Sweet something of an anomaly. There's a lesson for artists too: Hozier stayed true to his vision and made music on his own terms. “He's fully aware that he only cares about his fans and not what would work for radio or the gimmicks that work in the industry, like remixes,” Muckian says. “He stays away from industry tricks. He puts his fans first… The fact that this is now playing on Top 40 radio in the United States is not because we wanted to design a song for Top 40 radio. I think staying true to the fan base is the absolute most important thing.”