A few hours earlier — amid the din of a waiting crowd — I overheard a girl up ahead ask, “Do you know who the supporting act is?” Beside her, a pair of shoulders shrugged in response. Moments later those same shoulders were swaying as Joy Oladokun won over the crowd with a mix of folk-flavoured indie pop and a dark, self-deprecating sense of humour as finely tuned as her guitar.

From 'Drugs' — “The drugs don’t work / Oh, I can’t get high,” she sang, lamenting the limits of self-medicating — to 'Strong Ones' — “I’m having trouble deciding / if wearing the crown is worth the arthritis,” she pleaded, tired of being told she’s strong — the American singer-songwriter brought the opening set to a close with 'Sweet Symphony' — her 2022 duet with Chris Stapleton. In those quiet, anticipatory moments before the song took flight, Joy coyly suggested it sounds less crazy when she isn’t left to sing both parts herself. It’s a fate she wouldn’t suffer twice, returning before the night was through — to chanting, rather than questioning — for a joint rendition of 'Work Song'.

Until then, the stage belonged to the Irishman. “No closer could I be to God,” he crooned, and the crowd of more than 13,000 raised their voices in agreement. ‘Eat Your Young’ followed, chased down by the sordid addiction of ‘Angel of Small Death and the Codeine Scene’, as the setlist swayed seamlessly from new hits to newfound favourites for those in the audience who found God on earth in the radio-friendly, TikTok tempo of 'Too Sweet' — and in doing so gave Hozier his first #1 single.

It would take another song or three for the band to find their footing, Hozier’s voice warring with Spark Arena’s long-running issues with sound balancing, but by the time ‘It Will Come Back’ faded into ‘Like Real People Do’, it was clear the night had been worth the wait.

Andrew Hozier-Byrne — as he’s less commonly known — has earned a reputation, of sorts, for being late. Or, rather, for making people wait. His 2014 self-titled debut album, for example, wouldn’t receive its sophomore sister — Wasteland, Baby! — until 2019. It would take just as long again for Hozier to return with 2023’s Unreal Unearth, heralding the second coming of a man who had been gone just long enough to be named 2024’s Billboard Comeback Artist of the Year.

Unreal Unearth wasn’t just the first new music we’d received from Hozier in almost five years; it would also go on to be the most we’d ever had all at once. There was March of 2023’s EP — Eat Your Young. The album itself followed that August. Then there were 2024’s two EPs — March’s Unheard and August’s Unaired. Finally, December saw the release of Unreal Unearth: Unending, a super deluxe version of the album featuring a new song in Hymn to Virgil. And that’s saying nothing of the 83-stop, 72-city world tour that kicked off in early 2023 and only just wrapped up last October.

You’ll forgive Hozier’s fans, then, for thinking this might have been something of a warning. A sign, even. A portent, perhaps, that this might also be the last music we’d get from Hozier… well, ever. “Is this Hozier’s last album?” begs a Reddit thread, so hastily written you can feel the panic rising with every misspelled word. “Unending” reads a YouTube comment below the unveiling of Unreal Unearth: Unending. “I’m CERTAIN this man is gonna go missing for half a decade before we get any more music again”.

Hozier isn’t the only artist whose greatest act might be that of disappearing — ABBA, Matchbox Twenty, and Guns N’ Roses all have him beat by a decade or more — but something has always felt right about the idea that Hozier’s release cycle is dictated more by some kind of ancient, oats-based prophecy than the contract with his record label. If only reality were so sweet.

For a man who has made a career out of invoking gods, myths, and legends, I couldn’t help but look up at Hozier that night and think he resembled Sisyphus, doomed — like most artists — to push a vinyl record up the charts for all eternity in service of remaining known.

I also thought of Fall Out Boy, and how the band followed 2008’s controversial-cum-classic Folie à Deux with a four and a half year hiatus before returning with Save Rock and Roll — eleven tracks of melancholy musings on what it’s like to return to a scene that’s already begun to forget you. I thought of Kiwi local Lorde, who left her family and country behind before penning a love-letter-turned-break-up-note of a sophomore album in Melodrama — a release whose tour saw her performing to half-empty stadiums and questioning her future as an artist. And I thought of Florence Welch who, leading up to the release of 2022’s Dance Fever, posted a TikTok with a caption reading "The label are begging me for 'low fi tiktoks' so here you go. pls send help. ☠️x".

Welch would later tell The New Yorker that she came around to the idea thanks to the community — “...which I found to be anarchic and hilarious and weird in a way that I really enjoyed.” — but these days it seems your favourite artists either die young or live just long enough to see themselves rediscovered via TikTok.

For Hozier, this moment came with the aforementioned 'Too Sweet' — a track he repeatedly told interviewers he cut from Unreal Unearth because “...people don’t want to hear this stuff, we’ll just put it away.” Even gods suffer from imposter syndrome, it seems. During the height of its popularity, you would open social media to find newcomers stumbling on ‘old’ songs while elder millennials implored them to listen to foundational texts like ‘Movement’ and ‘Take Me to Church’ (which, as it happens, only ever made it to #2).

Rebirth. Reinvention. Rediscovery. They’re hardly new phenomena. Hell, kids were discovering The Beatles star Paul McCartney in 2015 via ‘FourFiveSecond’ — his collaboration with Rihanna and Kanye West. Yet as I stood amongst a crowd that probably learned Gerard Way was, like, totally in a band via the comic-turn-Netflix-series The Umbrella Academy, or whose kids will say they first heard Patrick Stump on the “Spidey and His Amazing Friends!” soundtrack, it hit me as I suspect it does every generation: nothing is forever, ‘known’ is such an odd concept and, fuck, I’m getting old.

As the night grew old with me, Hozier took to the B-stage — all silhouettes and acoustic guitar strings — for an encore of ‘Cherry Wine’, ‘Francesca’, and ‘Unknown / Nth’. ‘Nina Cried Power’ and the aforementioned ‘Work Song’ followed, ushering in the return of Joy Oladokun and the main stage as the duo brought the night to a close. Yet more than a year since the confetti came down and the lights came up, it's 'Francesca' and 'Unknown / Nth' that still reverberate in my chest.

“I would not change it each time” Hozier vows as ‘Francesca’ reaches its blood-pumping, drum-thumping crescendo. “Heaven is not fit to house a love” he all but whispers, as if God himself may take offence “Like you and I.”

If ‘Francesca’ is Hozier's ode to a love worth suffering the weight of existence for, then ‘Unknown’ is the all-too-familiar heartache of a love that looks upon the injuries you’ve suffered in the name of devotion and demands “Why don’t you love me enough?” — every word cuts like a switchblade slipped up and under the ribcage; every pluck of the guitar a twist of the knife.

In every fleeting moment of self-awareness — “Funny how true colours shine in darkness and in secrecy / If there were scarlet flags, they washed out in the mind of me” — in every joyous memory — “You called me "angel" for the first time, my heart leapt from me” — in every bloody consequence — “You smile now, I can see its pieces still stuck in your teeth / And what's left of it, I listen to it tick / Every tedious beat going unknown as any angel to me” — you hear the familiar desperation for someone — anyone — on this godforsaken space rock to know you.

You can’t help it, in moments like that. You can’t help but get caught up in it all, gazing up at him there, bathed in the warm glow of the stage lights, strumming his guitar like a celestial apology — God’s penance for making man. It’s as though Hozier just… isn’t of this world. Or rather, was never meant for this world: a world as harsh, as horrifying, or as hungry as this. He confesses as much on 2014’s ‘To Be Alone’ — “All I've ever done is hide / From our times” — yet the reclusive performer continues to prove there’s beauty to be found in even the most broken of things.

Every lyric. Every interview. Every comment. Hozier reads — as the bookish community might say — like a man written by a woman. Or, rather, like a man who writes about women, about romance, and about love and loss and grief as though they’re the only logical reasons to still draw breath.

Here is a man who, rather than cling to fame, would rather be known as someone who interrupts his own show to preach a message of acceptance, of peace, and of a ceasefire in the Middle East. And as he implored the crowd that being known — truly, earnestly known — is all within our grasp if we’re brave enough to shed our inhibitions, drop to our knees, and rip it free from the very earth itself — half-formed yet beautiful — they believed him. You could see it in their eyes, even as they filtered out of Spark Arena. They truly believed him. More than that, so did I.

I also believe that, in spite of how fleeting his return to New Zealand may have been, this is hardly the last we’ll see of Hozier. As for when he might return? That… remains less clear. All I know is when he does he’ll likely be a little late. Perhaps even overdue. But ‘unknown’? Hardly. He will reemerge from his home in Wicklow Ireland as if some lyrically gifted Irish cryptid — guitar in hand, heart bloodying his sleeve, humming new tunes. And god, what tunes they’ll be.