Kate Bush may be on track to have her most successful week in the US everand it’s all Netflix’s fault. Variety reports that streams of Bush’s classic 1985 track “Running Up That Hill,” the first single from her fifth studio album, Hounds Of Lovehave increased more than 8,000 percent since last week—thanks almost entirely to the song’s heavily featured presence in the fourth season of Stranger Things,
As those who’ve already consumed the first portion of the season know, “Running Up That Hill” is the favorite song of Sadie Sink’s character Max, who listens to it frequently as she tries to process her feelings of grief and guilt over her brother Billy’s death. The song comes fully to the forefront in the season’s fourth episode, “Dear Billy,” in which it serves as both a major plot point related toas well as the soundtrack for, a deadly escape sequence centered on Max and the season’s villain, Vecna,
Correspondingly, the song has blown up on the streaming charts over Memorial Day weekend, jumping from a couple of hundred plays last week, to 12,000 on Sunday, and 34,000 on Wednesday. The raise occurred across all the major streamers, and is likely to propel Bush—always a bigger name in the UK than the US—to her highest position ever on the Stateside Billboard Hot 100 (eclipsing “Running Up That Hill”‘s previous No. 30 position from 1985).
Variety also has an interview with the show’s music supervisorBush’s support, revealing how the show landed, given that she’s usually pretty picky about song licensing. (Spoiler: Her being a Stranger Things The fan probably helped, as did detailed descriptions for how the song would reflect Max’s journey throughout the season,
Anyway: It’s not like there’s a bad excuse for people to be listening to Kate Bush; there’s no data yet on whether “Running Up That Hill”’s sudden late-life success has halo-ed out to the rest of her discography, but one can live in hope.
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