Kate Bush (Hounds of Love Graphic)

Kate Bush — Hounds of Love 

Released in 1985, Hounds of Love is Kate Bush at the height of her powers—strange, romantic, theatrical, experimental, and somehow still capable of producing enormous pop songs.

The album opens with “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God),” followed by “Hounds of Love,” “The Big Sky,” and “Cloudbusting”—an absurdly good run of songs before the record turns into something even stranger. Its second side, The Ninth Wave, is a seven-song suite following a woman alone in the water at night, drifting between consciousness, memory, fear, and hallucination.

Bush produced the album herself, much of it created at the studio she had built near her family home. That freedom allowed her to make something completely on her own terms: Fairlight synthesizers, pounding drums, Irish instrumentation, layered voices, literary references, and all the wonderfully peculiar details that make a Kate Bush record sound like nobody else.

And then there’s the imagery. The iconic album cover photographed Kate with her two Weimaraners, Bonnie and Clyde, transforming something as simple as lying beside two sleeping dogs into one of the great album covers of the 1980s.