Album Anniversaries: The Everlasting Spell of Kate Bush’s ‘Hounds of Love’

35 years later, Kate Bush’s impassioned battle cry for femininity, sexuality, and total renewal remains one of pop’s greatest albums of all time.

In Album Anniversaries, writers honor their favorite aging albums and their subsequent legacies, revealing which projects have stood the test of time.

Written by Zoe Judilla

At the precipice of a bizarre lucid dream stands the inimitable Kate Bush, eyes wide, hands outstretched, ready to take you down the holy winding paths only she knows about.

The lovingly dubbed Patron Saint of Alternative Pop has become a defining voice for experimentation in a sonic playscape of predictability. Bush embraced lyrical themes of gender equality and sexual liberation in the unforgivably masculine early ’80s, and her imaginative ideation of femininity remains an influence on various modern pop acts today.

But Bush’s deity status didn’t come instantly. Only when the dismal post punk of the mid-’70s (Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division) melted into the zealous overproduction of the next decade did critics begin to take notice of the British wunderkind, who was producing singles infectious enough for radio hits, but campy enough to trailblaze prog rock.

Though subject to early criticism for her showiness or assumed performativity, Bush wore her femininity as a kind of armor — and with her fifth album Hounds of Love, she reaches her emotional and compositional peak. Bush summons the powers of modern technology, traditional Irish instrumentals, and her shockingly protean vocal register to sing epic tales of guilt, grief, and God.

Bush created Hounds of Love following the muddled reception of her first entirely self-produced record, 1982’s The Dreaming. The artist’s experimental fourth album saw her dabbling with the new and complex digital Fairlight CMI sampling synthesizer, a notoriously “arty” contraption used by the likes of Peter Gabriel and Thomas Dolby in attempts to usher in a new age of techno-pop production. While critics found her first creation with the computer too radical for commercial success, the songstress continued her experimentation into her fifth album.

In a 1982 discussion with Electronic Music Maker, Bush said her attraction to the Fairlight was bent on “its ability to create very human, animal, emotional sounds that don’t actually sound like a machine. I think, in a way, that’s what I’ve been waiting for.”

So, in 1984, Bush fled London alongside her partner and bassist Del Palmer, opting to spend the summer in a quaint farmhouse away from the public eye. She built a 48-track studio in her family barn and created Hounds of Love within a year, taking a rather abnormal approach to the standard hitmaker use of the synthesizer. Meshing the new tech with oddball traditional instrumentals such as the didgeridoo, the bouzouki lute, and uilleann bagpipes, Bush leaned into her curious sensibilities to pioneer a new kind of pop, both lyrically and sonically — one that valued artful experimentation over redundancy.

The cinematic prowess of Bush can best be portrayed in the accompanying visuals of the album: a confetti-haired woman waltzing with her lover, a couple in synchronized harmony bathed in moonlight, even Donald Sutherland maniacally manufacturing a cloudbuster machine. Bush opts for the offbeat while maintaining the serious responsibility of storytelling, a quality central to the narrative structure of the album.

The project is divided into two suites: Side One, Hounds of Love, and Side Two, The Ninth Wave. Its pop-friendly first half holds some of Bush’s biggest commercial successes, while its cerebral latter half follows the story of a shipwrecked sailor at the brink of death, fading in and out of consciousness.

“Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)” gradually rumbles into the fray with a skittish synth riff over a bold drum beat, as the song epically portrays Bush’s divine desire to switch bodies with her male partner. Bush’s heavily emotive vocals bolster her yearning for common ground, though she equates her futile efforts to “running up that road,” or hill, or building. While her vocals showcase a self-imposed sense of dominance, she just as quickly diverts to her gentleness, timidly asking her lover, “Tell me, we both matter, don’t we?”

The inherent majesty of “Running Up That Hill” made it the most commercially successful song of the album, marking Bush’s first U.S. crossover hit and even sparking discussions of gender identity in the States. At the song’s close, Bush uses the Fairlight to pitch down her vocals to a more masculine range, as if her deal miraculously came to fruition. Today, the track continues to be used in celebration of queer and transgender narratives, underlining the profundity of its progressive themes.

The album’s titular track is a victorious ode to love and the common fear that comes with falling into it. A sample from the cult horror movie “Night of the Demon” (“It’s in the trees! It’s coming!”) preambles victorious synths and punchy violin, as Bush inflects her hesitancy with emotional attachment: “Now hounds of love are hunting / I’ve always been a coward.” But instead of retracting, she ultimately decides to dive in: “Oh, here I go! / It’s coming for me through the trees!” As Bush wrestles with love, she emits a furious growl, releasing any previous reservations. She heralds her newfound freedom accordingly (“Take my shoes off and throoooow them in the lake!”), with liberated intonation.

The first suite is outwardly glorious in comparison to its existential latter half, with tracks like “The Big Sky” utilizing bouncy bass guitar and gospel choirs to depict independence. The dreamy “Cloudbusting” soars through a triumphant cello-driven melody, contrastingly telling the tragic story of philosopher Wilhelm Reich, who built a “cloudbuster” machine that had the ability to create rain, but was later arrested and imprisoned for violating FDA laws with his research. The song is set from the point of view of Reich’s young son, Peter, reflecting a sense of childhood disillusionment and the loss of his father: “But everytime it rains / You’re here in my head / Like the sun coming out.”

As much as Bush revels in biblical imagery — Latin pleas for divine intervention, glorious choral refrains, and even deals with God herself — it’s evident she’s more interested in the concept of salvation. The second suite of the album illustrates a narrative of death and rebirth, following a shipwrecked sailor hallucinating parts of her past, present, and future to keep her alive until morning.

The suite’s first track “And Dream of Sheep” introduces the character with Bush showcasing incredibly tender, almost fragile vocals over simple piano. Samples of seagulls cawing, disconnected voices, and more weave in and out of the track, while the sailor gently pleads for never-ending peace: “Let me be weak / Let me sleep / And dream of sheep.” As her wish comes true, the haunting “Under Ice” soundtracks the sailor’s eerie dream with cautious cello and low, layered vocals — only to realize she’s drowning in reality.

The Lynchian “Waking the Witch” is the first of three bizarre hallucinations, immediately cutting through the preceding track with samples of voices from the sailor’s past urging her to stay alive (“Can you not see that little light up there?” “Where?” There!” “Where?” “Over here…”). The gentle exchanges quickly turn violent, however, as the sailor begins to hallucinate that she’s on trial for witchcraft. The track is certainly a wildly textured feat, packed with Latin devil worship, blasphemic accusations, monstrous vocal distortions, glitchy prayers, and a wailing Bush, all meshing over crazed piano arpeggios. The subtler “Watching You Without Me” is a necessary comedown to the chaos.

Bush’s masterful control of her vocal range is weighted in her ability to sustain such heavy emotion in her delivery. She can seethe and simmer while just as quickly filling with sorrow, interchanging between moods and registers without hesitation. With the penultimate “Hello Earth,” Bush musters the last of her strength as an ode to the seeming end of the sailor’s life. Reminiscent of a final battle cry, the dramatic piano ballad, complete with Gregorian hymns, marks somewhat of an epic funeral for the character. Bush defiantly states: “I was there at the birth / Out of the cloudburst, the head of the tempest,” while a backing chorus calls out, “Murderer! / Murderer of calm!” Slowly, the pitched-down choir melts into the soundscape. As Bush fades into the unknown, a dreary haze of uncertainty signals journey's end — until it isn’t.

She decides to end on the lively “The Morning Fog,” as if the haze clears at a disarming rate — as if something has finally made the sailor whole. Bush says the final song is meant to signify the character’s unexpected rescue, a life-changing opportunity for her to start anew. As the sailor regains her senses, she fills with gratitude. Bush sweetly croons, “The light / Begin to bleed / Begin to speak / D’you know what? / I love you better now.” The airy track, wrought with playful violin and Fairlight-sampled whistles, ultimately rounds out a tale of restoration and rebirth.

As Bush’s magnum opus, Hounds of Love remains a worldly epic bursting with unbridled empathy. Amid her avant-garde sensibilities and noetic narratives, Bush championed the notion of a shocking female perspective — and at 35 years, her seminal work made pop music nothing less than a cinematic experience. Whether it was through a holy deal, a witch’s spell, or a devil’s prayer, we have the Patron Saint herself to thank for it.

ANALYSISAfterglow ATXSeptember 16, 2020