The 16th of September 2025 marks the 40th anniversary of Kate Bush’s angelic and surreal Hounds of Love – an album which leads the listener on a powerfully strange voyage through immense, towering soundscapes and down a sleepy rabbit hole into dreamy wonderlands. Kate Bush’s 5th studio LP is a monument in art-pop and baroque-pop, forming a cultural touchstone for successors across the music industry.
We open on the soaring synths of ‘Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)’, accompanied by thundering drums which escort us through the album’s initial tracks. Bush’s celestial vocal delivery thrusts us in-media-res into the action, and we are propelled through to the end of the song by an emerging heartbeat of plucky, distorted, electric guitars. ‘Hounds Of Love’ instantly seizes the velocity of its predecessor with the frenetic vocal sample “It’s in the trees! It’s coming!” Chugging strings underscore a riveting chase scene which steadily mounts in orchestral dynamics, accentuated by animalistic choral backings “Ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh, ooh, ooh.” In a type of transition that will become common in the album, the spatial landscape of ‘Hounds Of Love’ opens up the vast expanse of ‘The Big Sky’. The heavenly overtones here are set against the deep galloping of the bassline, with this conflict driving the overwhelming sense of flight in the sonic fabric of the album thus far.
… a powerfully strange voyage through immense, towering soundscrapes and down a sleepy rabbit hole into dreamy wonderlands.
‘Mother Stands For Comfort’ introduces a sudden dreamlike instability in what was previously a missile-like ascent with its discordant beat and alien synths. This is momentarily forgotten among the rhythmic swooping strings of ‘Cloudbusting,’ but the surreal dream takes over in ‘And Dream Of Sheep,’ which slows the album down to a beautiful lullaby. Our first real introduction to this unsettling dream world is ‘Under Ice,’ a mysterious, geological realm tinged with a softened ambience of fear, which takes on a new form than the primal terror of the title track.
In ‘Waking the Witch’ the abstract beast that is the second half of the album startlingly rears its head. Mellow pleas to “wake up” are cut off by a staggering giallo-esque arrays of shrill bells and stuttering vocals. A booming, breathy voice leads us into ‘Watching You Without Me,’ a refrain of muttered melodies set on top of curling basslines and sonorous steel pans. We are still submerged in a certain unreality with more choppy appeals to “Help me, baby! Help me, baby! Talk to me! Listen to me!” This bizarre reality continues with ‘Jig Of Life’, a track with strong Celtic influences featuring a hushed vocal break which announces: “I put this moment here, I put this moment here, I put this moment over here,” playing with temporal orientation with an occult tone which brings to mind a witch casting a mystifying time spell.
This disjointed perception of time is woven throughout ‘Hello Earth’, which intersperses space-age vocal samples and planetary instrumentation with the antiquated Celtic strings from the previous song, as well as dark choral harmonies as the track closes. In the final track ‘The Morning Fog,’ we spring up out of the ebbing darkness into a spirited guitar melody over which Bush sings of “Being born again.” We get the sense that we have come to some form of return to reality, but the wobbling low notes of the bass suggest a dizzy instability lingering from the phantasmagoria.
This meandering journey constructed by Kate Bush for this concept album has solidified Hounds of Love as an all-time classic in the cultural memory. Its timeless appeal has allowed it to proliferate well into the 21st century—even topping the charts in 2022 with ‘Running Up That Hill’ after its appearance in Stranger Things, making Bush the artist with the longest gap between Number 1 singles, at 44 years. Nevertheless, this album stands alone as a masterpiece with production so rich you can return to it over and over, finding hidden gems of meaning and instrumentation every single time.
