Where most British new wave artists reveled in the excess that defined the decade - just look at Adam Ant and his whole “dandy highwayman” bit - Kate Bush chose to hone in on something more universal, something that ensured her legacy would last long beyond the timely personas and albums produced by her contemporaries. “Babooshka” is sung from the perspective of a woman desperate not to lose the husband she loves so dearly, and the entire B-side of Hounds of Love is a conceptual suite about the pain of loneliness, telling the story of a woman floating in the sea all on her own. “Wuthering Heights” plays on the Emily Brontë novel of the same name, and the terrible kind of longing expressed by its characters’ warped relationship. It propelled her back to stratospheric stardom after the middling reception of her previous album, The Dreaming, and is certified double platinum.īush frequently dealt with the concepts of grief and longing in her work, and including those themes is arguably her trademark style. While her debut single, “Wuthering Heights,” rocketed her to stardom in the late 1970s, and her third album Never For Ever made her the first female artist to reach number one on the UK albums charts, Hounds of Love remains her greatest achievement. Hounds of Love as a whole was a phenomenally successful album for Bush.
The song featured prominently on American dance charts in 1986, and managed to reach the top thirty on the Billboard Top 100. The single was released in August 1985 - with Season 4 taking place in 1986 - and was a runaway success, the lead single on her album Hounds of Love and her first chart hit in America since 1978, when she burst onto the scene with “Wuthering Heights”. On one level, “Running Up That Hill” is an ideal choice as “Max’s song” because it fits into the timeline that the Duffer Brothers have created for Seasons 3 and 4 of Stranger Things. (The last time her work appeared in a major production was in 2020’s Palm Springs, which featured “Cloudbusting," another single from the same album as “Running Up That Hill”.) But even more impressively, the song manages to communicate exactly what Max can’t throughout the season: her own internal grief, the raging feelings brought on by the immense amount of trauma she’s experienced over the last two seasons.
The appearance of the song on television at all is a massive feat, as Bush is notoriously selective about licensing her music for the screen. “Running Up That Hill” has rocketed up the iTunes chart since Season 4 dropped on Netflix, and Bush’s popularity has swelled in a way that it hasn’t since she performed live at the Hammersmith Odeon in London in 2014, her first live performance since the 1970s. Bush’s popularity has seen minor swells in the last year or so, with a few of her songs briefly trending on TikTok, but it’s Stranger Things that has really brought her back in the public eye properly.
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