“Running Up That Hill” by Kate Bush

"Running Up That Hill" was the first taste of Hounds of Love, Kate Bush's fifth studio album, and EMI put it out in August 1985. She wrote it and produced it herself, building it around a Fairlight CMI synthesizer and a LinnDrum drum machine, and the result sounds like nothing else from that year: a relentless, thudding pulse, synth lines that swell like weather, and Bush's voice straining against the whole machine. The song imagines a man and a woman striking a bargain with God to trade places, which explains the "A Deal with God" that sometimes rides along in the title.

Brian Tench mixed it. Bush unveiled it on the BBC One chat show Wogan, and the video set her in an interpretive dance. It went to number three in the UK, her best showing since "Wuthering Heights" went to the top in 1978. In America it peaked at number 30 on the Hot 100. Melody Maker and NME both named it among the year's best tracks, and it was up for British Single of the Year at the 1986 Brit Awards.

It has refused to go away. A remix played at the 2012 Summer Olympics closing ceremony sent it back to number six in Britain, Rolling Stone ranked it 60th on its 500 Greatest Songs of All Time in 2021, and a spot in Netflix's Stranger Things in 2022 took it to number one in eight countries.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.