Hozier explores his feelings of alienation from his own culture through his love of a woman who doesn’t conform to society’s edicts. Similar to “Take Me to Church,” he mixes the sacred and the sexual in his worship of this woman who is like an ancient goddess.

Said Hozier in a track-by-track video series on his YouTube channel:

It’s about feeling alien in a culture of feeling, feeling distant from your own cultural values, your own place, from the accepted ideas that you inherited. And not feeling right, and not being able to express that… just feeling wrong […] To a degree, of course, there’s an aspect of culture or cultural mentality that doesn’t sit right with people."