‘Hounds of Love’: Did Kate Bush invent hyperpop?
Prior to the release of Hounds of Love in 1985, Kate Bush had already forged a remarkable career for herself through the constant boundary-pushing and reshaping of pop conventions. On her first album, The Kick Inside, many of the songs that she showcased took on a delightfully progressive approach to writing pop music, with baroque and jazz influences coming into play throughout, and it’s staggering to believe that it was all written by a teenager. So few other artists have ever displayed such immense talent at that tender age, and knowing that she was capable of such greatness early on in her career had people rightfully excited by what she would do later on.
Hounds of Love is not so much a dramatic turning point in her career, but one that marks the pinnacle of her talents. Her fourth album, The Dreaming, which was released three years prior in 1982, had already seen her experiment with different production styles and had a greater emphasis placed on synthesisers and unusual production styles. Much of this was carried over into Hounds of Love but was expanded upon in a way that made it more accessible than its predecessor. However, that’s not to say that Hounds of Love is a straightforward pop record, as it was far more ambitious than anything she had produced to date.
It remains a hugely influential record not only in the modern pop sphere, but has inspired artists within other genres to create much more expansive works. However, to say that modern pop bears a great deal of resemblance to Kate Bush’s masterpiece would be inaccurate, as many other things have happened in the time since that have also helped to sway the direction of modern pop music. One of the more recent innovations that has begun to take hold of the genre is the advent of hyperpop – a genre largely characterised by the complex and rapid rhythms of electronic dance music in the 1990s and 2000s, with elements of hip-hop and R&B being incorporated into its sound.
Pinpointing exactly where the phenomenon of hyperpop began is a difficult task, and one that not even those who supposedly operate within the genre’s conventions can always agree on. The things that tie together artists such as Charli XCX, SOPHIE, and 100 gecs, is a chaotic approach to production, a modern gloss and an appreciation of dance music, but many might argue that even these three supposedly central acts don’t always fit the bill when it comes to determining what constitutes hyperpop.
There’s certainly a glossiness to Hounds of Love, and the production styles are definitely all over the place, but it came before the emergence of dance music and bears little resemblance to the house and breakbeat subgenres that have provided some sort of backbone to the nebulous concept of hyperpop. If it were made in 2014, would AG Cook’s PC Music label have scooped up Kate Bush and transformed her into the figurehead of the movement that they helped create, or would she have been categorised in other ways.
Arguably, Bush’s work on this record holds more in common with the slightly more abstract and artsy works of performers like Caroline Polachek and FKA Twigs, two acts who operate in adjacent fields to hyperpop but can’t be accurately pinned to such a label. Hounds of Love shares the same ethereal and magical touch that Desire, I Want to Turn Into You and Magdalene both possess, but it doesn’t have the same club-ready feel that hyperpop acts tend to adopt for themselves. Nobody is going to be vibing out to ‘Cloudbusting’ in Berghain, and putting on ‘Waking the Witch’ at an afters is more likely to freak out partygoers than convince them to keep the night going until dawn.
Bush’s direct influence on artists in the following decade is far easier to trace, and the inspiration that Hounds of Love would have had on artists like Björk is what bridges the gap between her work and the modern innovations in pop music. It might be a wildly ambitious record that is rightfully celebrated due to its unparalleled genius, but to claim that Bush invented hyperpop with this album doesn’t feel right considering just how much it draws from ambient, new age and folk influences.
Given that hyperpop is a flimsy piece of recent terminology that doesn’t even know where its own boundaries lay at this moment in time, the scope of what it can offer as a genre has quite possibly not been discovered yet. There might be time for it to begin to innovate in a way that is more encompassing of the artsy synth-pop of Hounds of Love, but as things stand, it exists in a totally different work that remains a singular landmark of pop that few others have managed to create a work on the same level as.
