Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
Encyclopedia of Popular Music
Hot Press	11/12
Pitchfork	10/10
Q
The Rolling Stone Album Guide
Smash Hits	9/10
Sounds
Spin Alternative Record Guide	8/10
The Village Voice	B

Hounds of Love is the fifth studio album by the English singer-songwriter and musician Kate Bush, released by EMI Records on 16 September 1985. It was a commercial success and marked a return to the public eye for Bush after the relatively poor sales of her previous album, The Dreaming. It was Bush's second album to top the UK Albums Chart and her best-selling studio album, having been certified double platinum for 600,000 sales in the UK, and by 1998 it had sold 1.1 million copies worldwide. In the US, it reached the top 40 on the Billboard 200. The album's lead single, "Running Up That Hill", became one of Bush's biggest hits, and it produced three further successful singles, "Cloudbusting", "Hounds of Love", and "The Big Sky", all taken from the album's first side. The second side, subtitled "The Ninth Wave", forms a conceptual suite about a person drifting alone in the sea at night.

Hounds of Love received critical acclaim on its release and in retrospective reviews. It is considered by many fans and music critics to be Bush's best album, and has been regularly voted one of the greatest albums of all time. The album was nominated at the 1986 BRIT Awards for Best Album, where Bush was also nominated for the awards for Best Producer, Best Female Artist, and for Best Single ("Running Up That Hill").

Following the disappointing sales of Bush's fourth album, The Dreaming, EMI was concerned about sales largely due to the long time period it took to produce the album. "I finished my last album, did the promotion, then found myself in a kind of limbo," she later explained. "It took me four or five months to be able even to write again. It's very difficult when you've been working for years, doing one album after another. You need fresh things to stimulate you. That's why I decided to take a bit of the summer out and spend time with my boyfriend and with my family and friends, just relaxing. Not being Kate Bush the singer; just being myself." In the summer of 1983, Bush built her own 48-track studio in the barn behind her family home which she could use any time she liked.

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