Photo: Emma Viola Lilja
A man hastily buries a locked box in an overgrown field, his face painted with a look of urgent, panicked dread. Later, observed by a hooded figure, the same man embraces, shares a cigarette with, and passionately kisses another man. Later still, the same man is dragged, weakly struggling, into the woods by a gang of men, and beaten. This, with a quarter of a billion YouTube views, is the video to one of the most popular songs in recent memory.
Two years ago this week, an unknown Irish musician released a soul song, whose lyrics detailed his disillusionment with the Catholic Church. On paper, it's not something you'd put much money on selling seven million copies worldwide - but that is exactly what happened to Hozier's 'Take Me To Church'.
"I'll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies," Hozier spits in the song's chorus, which is at once sharply bitter and euphoric, "I'll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife."
Watch Gigwise's interview with Hozier below
When Gigwise spoke to him shortly before the song's popularity exponentially exploded , Hozier was hesitant to agree that it was an indictment of religion. "I wouldn't like to think of it as an indictment against religion or an indictment against institutions," he insisted, "It would perhaps be an indictment against institutions that undermine some of the more natural parts of being a person - undermine humanity in some way, shape or form."
"The church has quite a legacy. It has quite a history on his hands," he admitted, with a heavy sigh. "Even this year, things keep coming up in the news, things are still being found out about atrocities, human atrocities. It hasn't been a good few years for the church..." He paused, before adding, with a weary laugh, "It hasn't been a good few hundred years for the church."
"The video," he explained, "was in tandem with a political campaign [in Russia] which successfully removed the rights of LGBT people to advocate for their own rights, so free speech essentially. It was a very successful campaign, which smeared it and put it in line with things like bestiality and paedophilia, brandished them as 'non-traditional' sexual orientations.
"With that, there came a rise in attacks of ultra right-wing gangs, who would lure young vulnerable members of the LGBT community into places and ambush them and torture them and attack them - and film them. So that's what the video references."
Watch the video for 'Take Me To Church' below
Two years on from the release of the song, and the Russian LGBT propaganda law is still firmly in place, as the debate over equal rights still rages on - including in the comment section of the video itself. Hozier isn't interested in engaging with the 164,000 people who've written underneath his video though. "A YouTube comment section, I don't count that as controversy. It's like a toilet wall, it's like the wall of a public toilet."
Whether Hozier approves of all forms of discussion or not, 'Take Me To Church' continues to prompt bigger conversations of social inequality in 2015. "If I don't think a song is worth writing, I'll wait until it is," he told us.
Two years, 250 million YouTube views and seven million copies later, it's probably safe to say that 'Take Me To Church' was - just about - worth writing.
