Hozier achieves first Billboard No. 1 of his career

A full decade after popping up out of pretty much nowhere to help a whole generation of music lovers find god, Hozier has somehow done the unthinkable: he’s written a song on track to be even more successful than “Take Me To Church.” Here’s something else that may be pretty shocking to anyone who lived through the era when it felt almost impossible to turn on the car radio without hearing “my lover’s got humor…”: “Take Me To Church” never actually hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. While the 2014 earworm’s No. 2 peak is still a momentous achievement considering it had pop perfection in Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” to contend with, and especially since Hozier was a relative unknown at the time, his newest single has managed to ascend even further.

Billboard announced today that “Too Sweet” had risen to claim the top spot on the chart, three weeks after the song debuted at No. 5. (Full chart data will be available later this week.)

This is an especially notable accomplishment considering the Irish singer-songwriter’s trajectory since his first, self-titled record dropped ten years ago. In that time, he’s continued to release high-quality work every few years on two LPs—Wasteland, Baby (2019) and Unreal Unearth (2023)—and a smattering of smaller collections, but nothing that’s ever broken through to the mainstream quite like that first song. To finally do it again on the heels of Unreal Unearth, an album that didn’t necessarily get the buzz it deserved, for a song that was released as part of an EP for tracks that didn’t even make the record’s final cut, is pretty staggering.

“I’m taken massively by surprise by it,” Hozier said today in an Instagram video thanking his listeners. “I just want to say thank you so, so much for your support… it means the world to me.”

But the nature of “Too Sweet”’s release isn’t even the most surprising part of its ascendancy. According to Billboard, the song’s No. 5 debut earlier this month marked the end of an artist’s longest wait between top 10 singles since The Beatles returned to the chart with “Now And Then” last November. It’s also only the fifth No. 1 from an Irish artist ever. The last was Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” which spent four weeks atop the chart in 1990.

Another notable entry on this week’s list is Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso,” which, with almost 20 million streams in its first week, marks the artist’s Hot 100 debut at No. 7. Carpenter just played her second weekend at this year’s Coachella festival, during which she alluded to her boyfriend Barry Keoghan’s movie Saltburn in an outro to her song, “Nonsense” (“He’s drinking my bath water like it’s red wine”), and wore a shirt referencing her scandal with the Catholic Church last year, that read “Jesus was a Carpenter.” We may really be approaching a new golden age for pop music.