Hounds of Love

In the summer of 1983, Bush began laying the groundwork for Hounds of Love at her home recording onto 8-track equipment, using a LinnDrum, Fairlight and piano. Wanting to retain the feel and atmosphere of these early recordings, she had them transferred to 24-track to build the final versions around once recording sessions officially began in November 1983.^[11][12] Following these sessions, as well as several recording sessions in Ireland during the spring of 1984, Bush began overdubbing and mixing the album in a process that took a year and the album was finished in June 1985. The recording sessions included use of the Fairlight CMI synthesiser, piano, traditional Irish instruments, and layered vocals. "Waking the Witch" quotes from the chorus of the sea shanty "Blood Red Roses." The chorale in "Hello Earth" is a segment from the traditional Georgian song "Tsintskaro", performed by the Richard Hickox Singers.^[13] The lines "It's in the trees! It's coming!" from the beginning of the title track are sampled from a seance scene from the 1957 British horror film Night of the Demon, spoken by actor Maurice Denham.^[14]

The album was produced as two suites, with side one being subtitled Hounds of Love and side two a seven-track concept piece subtitled The Ninth Wave. The album has been described as post-progressive because Bush voices themes of love and womanly passion rather than the usual male viewpoints associated with progressive rock.^[15]

The Ninth Wave uses a great many textures to express the story: in the style of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Arthurian poems, Bush pursues a vision quest, taking the listener through a death and rebirth. The warmth of familiar sleep is cut by dangerous speed, ice and frigid water, an otherworldly trial and judgement, an out-of-body limbo, and finally a vigorous emergence and grounding in life energy.^[15] The disparate musical elements of "The Ninth Wave" were described by Ron Moy as "classically prog" because of their evident experimentation, and because Bush wholly embraces European music traditions without a trace of American influence.^[16]

On 5 August 1985, Bush performed the new single "Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)" on Terry Wogan's BBC1 television chat show Wogan. The single entered the UK Singles Chart at number nine and ultimately peaked at number three, becoming Bush's second-highest-charting single after her chart-topping debut single "Wuthering Heights". The song is Bush's only US top 40 hit, reaching number 30 on the Billboard Hot 100 during its original chart run in 1985.

The album launch party was held at the London Planetarium on 5 September 1985. The invited guests were treated to a playback of the entire album while watching a laser show inside the Planetarium.^[17] Hounds of Love was released on 16 September 1985 by EMI Records on vinyl, XDR cassette and compact disc formats. It entered the UK Albums Chart at number one, knocking Madonna's Like a Virgin (1984) from the top position.^[7] The album marked Bush's breakthrough into the American charts with the Top 40 hit "Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)". The album also yielded a set of music videos, one of which was "Cloudbusting", directed by Julian Doyle and co-starring Donald Sutherland. The video, like the song, was inspired by the life of psychologist Wilhelm Reich.

As a companion to the album, a 20-minute videotape and LaserDisc, The Hair of the Hound, containing music videos for the four singles, was released in 1986.^[18]

On 16 June 1997, a remastered version of the album was issued on CD as part of EMI's "First Centenary" reissue series. The "EMI First Centenary" edition included six bonus tracks: 12″ mixes of "The Big Sky" and "Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)", and the B-sides "Under the Ivy", "Burning Bridge", "My Lagan Love", and "Be Kind to My Mistakes", the last of which was written for Nicolas Roeg's 1986 film Castaway and plays during the opening scene.^[19]

In 2010, Audio Fidelity reissued Hounds of Love on vinyl with new remastering by Steve Hoffman.^[20]

A 10" pink vinyl record with four songs taken from the album ("The Big Sky", "Cloudbusting", "Watching You Without Me" and "Jig of Life") was released by Audio Fidelity (catalogue number AFZEP 001) on 16 April 2011 for Record Store Day 2011, limited to 1000 copies worldwide.^[21]

During her 2014 Before the Dawn concerts, Bush performed almost the entire album live for the first time, with the exceptions of "The Big Sky" and "Mother Stands for Comfort". "Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)" had previously been performed live in 1987 with David Gilmour of Pink Floyd at the Secret Policeman's Third Ball.^[22]

In November 2018, Bush released box sets of remasters of her studio albums, including Hounds of Love.^[23]

More information Review scores, Source ...

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[24]
Los Angeles Times	[25]
Mojo	[26]
Pitchfork	10/10[27]
Q	[28]
Record Mirror	5/5[29]
The Rolling Stone Album Guide	[30]
Sounds	[31]
Spin Alternative Record Guide	8/10[32]
The Village Voice	B[33]

Close

Hounds of Love contemporarily received positive reviews in the UK. Sounds journalist Ronnie Randall hailed the album as "dramatic, moving and wildly, unashamedly, beautifully romantic",^[31] while Record Mirror's Robin Smith deemed it "a howling success" that "recaptures the ground Kate lost with her last album".^[29] In the NME, Jane Solanas called Hounds of Love "an obvious progression of the skill shown on The Dreaming" and scorned the idea that by signing to EMI as a teenager, Bush had allowed herself to be moulded in their corporate image, suggesting that on the contrary, it had enabled her to use the system for her own purposes: "Our Kate's a genius, the rarest solo artist this country's ever produced. She makes sceptics dance to her tune."^[34] It ranked at number 10 on the magazine's list of the best albums of 1985.^[35] A more reserved review came from Melody Maker's Colin Irwin, who found that Bush had "learned you can have control without sacrificing passion" despite "some overly fussy arrangements that get the better of her", although the Ninth Wave suite "is too confused and the execution too laborious and stilted to carry real weight as a complete entity."^[36]

In the US, reaction to the record at the time was mixed. "With traces of classical, operatic, tribal, and twisted pop styles," raved Steve Matteo in Spin, "Kate creates music that observes no boundaries of musical structure or inner expression ... While her eclecticism is welcomed and rewarded in her homeland her genius is still ignored here – a situation that is truly a shame for an artist so adventurous and naturally theatrical."^[37] In The New York Times, John Rockwell characterised the album's music as "slightly precious, calculated female art rock" and said that Bush had become "a real master of instrumental textures".^[38] Rolling Stone, in their first review of a Kate Bush record, was unimpressed: critic Rob Tannenbaum wrote that Hounds of Love "both dazzles and bores" and felt that while Bush's "orchestrations swell to the limits of technology", she "often overdecorates her songs with exotica ... There's no arguing that Bush is extraordinarily talented, but as with Jonathan Richman, rock's other eternal kid, her vision will seem silly to those who believe children should be seen and not heard."^[39]

In a retrospective piece for The Independent, Nick Coleman described Hounds of Love as Bush's "acknowledged masterpiece ... a prog-pop masque of an album built with the cold instrumentation of a neophiliac age".^[40] Spin called it an "art-pop classic",^[41] and Barry Walters of Pitchfork noted that the album draws from synth-pop and progressive rock whilst remaining wholly distinct from either style.^[27] In a 2025 40th anniversary reappraisal, Charles Switzer of PopMatters observed: "Forty years later, Hounds of Love's true power lies in this invitation: to use its sound to neurologically film what our dream worlds sound like."^[42]

Notes:

• "Hounds of Love" contains a sample of Maurice Denham's voice from Jacques Tourneur's horror film Night of the Demon (1957).
• "Hello Earth" contains an interpolation of the Georgian folk song "Tsintskaro" ("წინწყარო"), as performed by the Richard Hickox Singers.
• The original 1985 cassette release included the 12″ single version of "Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)" at the end of side one.
• The 2011 Fish People re-release and the 2018 remastered album substitute the "Special Single Mix" version of "The Big Sky", rather than the original album version.

Credits are adapted from the Hounds of Love liner notes.^[54]

• Kate Bush – vocals, Fairlight synthesizer, Yamaha CS-80, acoustic piano, keyboards
• Kevin McAlea – synthesizer sequencing (8), synthesizers (12)
• Alan Murphy – guitars (1, 3, 8)
• John Williams – guitars (12)
• Dónal Lunny – bouzouki (6, 10, 11), bodhrán (10)
• Del Palmer – LinnDrum programming, bass guitar (1, 10, 12), handclaps (3), backing vocals (5), Fairlight bass (8)
• Martin Glover – bass guitar (3)
• Eberhard Weber – double bass (4, 11)
• Danny Thompson – double bass (9)
• Stuart Elliott – drums (1, 2, 4, 5, 9–11)
• Charlie Morgan – drums (2, 3, 5, 8, 10), handclaps (3)
• Morris Pert – percussion (3)
• Paddy Bush^[b] – balalaika (1), didgeridoo (3), backing vocals (5), harmony vocals (7), fujara (12), violins (12)
• Jonathan Williams – cello (2)
• John Sheahan – whistles (6, 10), fiddles (10)
• Liam O'Flynn – Uilleann pipes (10, 11)
• Michael Kamen – orchestral arrangements
• Bill Whelan – Irish arrangements
• The Medici Sextet – strings (5)
• Dave Lawson – string arrangements (5)
• Brian Bath – backing vocals (5), guitars (11)
• John Carder Bush – backing vocals (5), narration (10)
• The Richard Hickox Singers – choir (11)
• Richard Hickox – choir master (11)
• Michael Berkeley – vocal arrangements (11)