Northern Attitude

Northern Attitude — Noah Kahan With Hozier

Vermont and Ireland, Bound by Cold

Some collaborations feel inevitable in retrospect, as though the songs were always waiting for both names on the artwork. Noah Kahan, the Vermont-born singer-songwriter who had been building a devoted following through earnest folk-adjacent songwriting since the late 2010s, and Hozier, the Wicklow, Ireland native whose debut decade had established him as one of the most thoughtful voices in contemporary folk-rock: the pairing made immediate, intuitive sense. Both artists drew from traditions rooted in geography and landscape; both wrote about the specific weights and comforts of the places that shaped them; both had proven that emotional directness without sentimentality could find large audiences.

Northern Attitude brought them together with a song already in Kahan's catalog, transformed by the addition of Hozier's presence into something larger and more textured than either artist might have made alone.

The Making of a Moment

Noah Kahan had released Stick Season, the album that became his commercial and critical breakthrough, in 2022. The following year brought expanded attention and a growing sense that the folk-adjacent space he occupied was finding a moment of mainstream receptivity. Northern Attitude was one of several tracks from that album period that took on new life through rerecordings and collaborations. The Hozier version represented the most significant of those expansions.

Hozier had been selective about collaborations throughout his career, which gave his participation additional weight. His voice, with its gospel-influenced depth and emotional range, added a second emotional pole to the track: Kahan's slightly anxious, self-aware New England energy in conversation with the larger, more grounded Irish timbre. The combination was striking without being showy.

Chart Performance and Sustained Presence

The collaboration debuted at number 37 on the Billboard Hot 100 on November 25, 2023, which was its peak position and its strongest week. It demonstrated genuine staying power, remaining on the chart through December and into January 2024, accumulating 12 weeks on the Hot 100 in total. That chart longevity set it apart from the majority of the songs in this batch: multiple weeks of sustained presence reflect a song that listeners returned to rather than simply streaming on release week.

The peak of 37 was particularly notable for a folk-adjacent track without a hip-hop or pop production framework; it reflected genuine crossover appeal beyond the core audiences of either artist.

Geography as Emotional Fact

The song's central subject is the specific quality of attachment to cold, isolated places: the way a landscape can be simultaneously oppressive and beloved, the way leaving a place and staying in it are both impossible, the way the weather of your childhood becomes the weather of your interior life. Kahan had made this territory his own across his earlier work, but Northern Attitude approached it with particular concentration.

Hozier's participation deepened the resonance: Ireland's western landscapes share something with Vermont's hills in terms of the particular emotional register they produce in people raised in them. When two voices from different cold-weather, rain-prone geographies sing together about that quality of place, the universality of the experience becomes audible.

The Folk Revival and Its Audience

The early 2020s saw a considerable revival of interest in singer-songwriter folk and Americana traditions, particularly among younger listeners who had grown up with the sonic maximalism of contemporary pop and were hungry for something quieter. Northern Attitude with Hozier reached over 10 million YouTube views and became a touchstone for that audience. Play it on a gray afternoon when you want to feel seen by the weather itself.

“Northern Attitude” — Noah Kahan's singular moment on the 2020s charts.