Hounds of Love — 1985

Background

Hounds of Love was released in 1985, widely regarded as Kate Bush's creative peak, recorded largely in a home studio she had built specifically to give herself complete creative control after growing frustrated with the compromises of conventional studio production. The album is structured in two distinct halves: a set of individual songs on side one, and a continuous conceptual suite, The Ninth Wave, on side two.

Sound

'Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)' opens the album with a driving, synthesizer-and-drum-machine arrangement paired with one of Bush's most direct, emotionally urgent vocal performances, addressing the desire to fully understand a partner's perspective. The title track pairs a lush, string-and-synth arrangement with a lyric using the metaphor of hunting hounds to explore vulnerability in love, one of Bush's most melodically direct and immediately accessible songs.

The Ninth Wave

Side two's continuous suite follows a woman lost at sea overnight, moving through fear, memory, hallucination and eventual rescue across seven interconnected songs, incorporating spoken-word passages, shifting vocal styles and unconventional structures that make it closer to a piece of musical theatre than a conventional song sequence. The ambition and coherence of this extended piece is widely regarded as one of the most accomplished conceptual song cycles in pop music.

Legacy

Hounds of Love is almost universally regarded as Kate Bush's finest album and one of the most significant and influential British albums of the 1980s, its combination of technical production ambition, emotional directness and structural daring having shaped generations of subsequent art-pop and alternative artists. Its 2022 chart resurgence, following the prominent use of 'Running Up That Hill' in a television series decades after release, introduced the album to an entirely new generation of listeners.