Artist: Kate Bush · Album: Hounds of Love · Year: 1985 · Label: EMI · Rank: 68 / 500
Hounds of Love is the rare art-pop record that feels both esoteric and wildly catchy. Kate Bush builds a world out of drum machines, Fairlight samples, strings, literary references, and that unmistakable voice, and somehow smuggles it into the charts.
Side A is a run of perfect singles; Side B is a concept suite about drowning, memory, and rebirth.
Side A: Pop Music from a Parallel Dimension
“Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” is the obvious entry point: a pulsing, syncopated drum pattern, haunted synth chords, and a lyric about wanting to swap places with a lover to truly understand them. It’s huge and intimate at the same time.
The title track gallops forward on big toms and strings, “The Big Sky” tumbles in a joyous, slightly unhinged swirl, and “Cloudbusting” turns a story about Wilhelm Reich’s cloud-seeding experiments into one of the most emotionally overwhelming pop songs of the ’80s.
Side B: The Ninth Wave
Flip the record and you’re in a different medium: a song cycle called “The Ninth Wave,” following a woman adrift in the sea at night, consciousness drifting between fear, hallucination, and ancestral memory.
“And Dream of Sheep” is fragile and lullaby-like, “Under Ice” and “Waking the Witch” get genuinely unnerving, moving through chopped voices, samples, and ritual-like rhythms. By the time you reach “The Morning Fog,” the sense of survival feels earned, not just narratively but emotionally.
Sound Design: Human and Synthetic at Once
Bush uses samplers and drum machines not to chase trends, but to build her own vocabulary. Folk instruments, Irish flavors, choirs, and experimental textures coexist without ever collapsing into gimmickry.
This is “’80s production” that somehow dodges the usual dated clichés.
Legacy
Art-pop, indie, avant-R&B, cinematic synth music – so many later artists are basically living in the house Kate Bush built here. Hounds of Love proves that pop can be deeply strange, deeply emotional, and still function as something you want to scream along to in the car.