Every Kate Bush Album, Ranked From Worst to Best

One of pop's most singular talents gets the discography deep dive treatment.

Kate Bush has never followed pop's rulebook. She's rewritten it, ripped it up, and set it on fire. In 2022, the world finally started giving her music its due.

When "Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)" catapulted back onto the charts thanks to Stranger Things, it wasn’t a viral fluke. It was a cultural reawakening. Listeners old and new realized they hadn’t just rediscovered a hit, but rather stumbled into this alternate universe built by one of the most eccentric and emotionally fearless artists in modern music.

From the very beginning, Bush forged her own path. Signed at 16, topping charts at 19, and producing her own albums in her early twenties, she became a template-breaking force in a male-dominated industry. Her music—equal parts literature, folklore, avant-garde theater, and raw emotional truth—remains unlike anything else out there.

Across ten studio albums, she’s sold over 30 million records, earned three Grammy nominations, and become a cult icon turned critical pillar. This discography ranking delves deep into her singular genius by counting down every studio album from worst to best (though 'worst' is relative in this context … you could argue she hasn’t made a bad album yet).

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Let’s begin:

10. Lionheart (1978)

A rushed sequel to her breakout debut, Lionheart suffers from a slapdash approach that doesn’t pack enough punch. Recorded and released just nine months after The Kick Inside, it captures a young artist caught in the machinery of industry momentum. Bush later admitted she was "very unhappy with Lionheart," telling Record Mirror in 1980: “I was just so tired. I needed time to find out who I was becoming. But I was just shoved straight back into it.”

That fatigue seeps into the album. While it cracked the UK Top 10, much of Lionheart feels like a collection of outtakes or demos from Kick. Tracks like “Symphony in Blue” and “Fullhouse” hint at the theatrical leanings she’d master later in her career, but here they wobble under their own ambition. "Hammer Horror" offers a flash of glam rock pomp, and “Wow” remains a highlight, with Bush’s vocals fluttering like birds trapped in cathedral rafters, full of urgent theatricality. Yet even those standouts feel stranded in an album that lacks cohesion.

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9. The Kick Inside (1978)

Bush’s debut, written largely while she was still in her mid-teens, is a feat of precocity, with all the uneven peculiarity that label entails. Its best-known single, "Wuthering Heights," was released when she was 19, a rare moment when mainstream music broadcasters embraced something this literary and off-kilter. Those descriptors are apt for The Kick Inside as a whole, which features a title track that depicts a woman contemplating suicide after becoming pregnant by her brother.

What’s most striking is how fully formed her perspective already was when she first gained notoriety. Songs like "The Man with the Child in His Eyes" (supposedly written when Bush was 13) exude eerie tenderness, sentiments that are often buoyed by fragile, timeless-sounding orchestration. Even the oddball rockers like “James and the Cold Gun” carry a subversive theatricality.

So why this low on the list? Essentially, because it’s a first draft of a persona she’d refine over decades of artistic and personal growth. In most cases, it’s a debut that whispers rather than roars, but you still feel the tremors of genius.

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8. The Red Shoes (1993)

By all accounts, The Red Shoes was crafted under emotional duress. Bush’s mother had recently died, and her long-term relationship with bassist Del Palmer had ended. She pushed through the pain and the grief, and the result is an album about obsession, identity, and artistic burnout. You’d think it would potentially be one of her most aloof releases, but, paradoxically, it features some of her most radio-ready production.

Inspired by the Powell & Pressburger film of the same name, the album explores the cost of performance and a singular artistic vision, both emotional and physical. “Moments of Pleasure” is a cathedral of grief, name-checking lost friends and family as piano chords bloom beneath her voice. “Just being alive,” she sings, “that can really hurt.” It’s one of her most emotionally naked (and affecting) recordings.

Elsewhere, she enlists Prince on the R&B cut "Why Should I Love You?", a song she later called “impossible to mix.” The production, while ambitious, often feels flat and kind of tinny, a casualty of early-90s digital recording techniques (see Springsteen’s “Human Touch” for another example of this aesthetic holding a potentially great song back). While the album’s highs border on transcendent, there’s a scattered, overworked energy here that muddies the waters.

Unsurprisingly, given the context of its creation, Bush wouldn’t release another original studio album for twelve years.

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7. Never for Ever (1980)

Bush’s third album marked a significant creative shift. It boasted her first co-production credit and eventually became the first British album by a solo female artist to top the UK charts. It’s also the first time she wielded the Fairlight CMI sampler in the studio, a tool that would become central to her sound for the rest of the 80s. Part of its appeal was a built-in “human element.” *"*I'm very into natural sounds—particularly taking them out of their range,” she said. “I suppose I like the distortion of natural things.”

You can hear her confidence surging with each passing track. Never for Ever feels more cinematic and, in some cases, intentionally strange than its predecessors. “Babooshka” dramatizes a wife’s bait-and-switch seduction plot with hilariously cartoonish flair. “Army Dreamers” tackles militarism with the most scathing of lullabies. And “Breathing,” perhaps the most unnerving track here, is sung from the perspective of a fetus during a nuclear apocalypse. Harrowing yet somehow still beautiful.

There’s still a sense of Bush being a bit of a work-in-progress on this LP. But, if nothing else, this release is where Bush’s distinctiveness takes a serious leap forward. Structurally and sonically, Never for Ever feels like it’s when she begins to fully own her singularity.

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6. Aerial (2005)

Released after a 12-year hiatus, Aerial arrived like a sunbeam through dusty curtains. It’s slow, radiant, and defiantly out of step with pop’s prevailing trends at that time, which favored sleek, more uptempo radio fare from acts like Coldplay and Gwen Stefani. In contrast, Aerial is an almost monastic listen, more focused on stillness than anything else.

Though touted as a comeback of sorts, it sounds more like Bush was grasping desperately for authenticity, not popularity. Across two discs, she explores themes including domesticity, art, time, and transcendence. A Sea of Honey, the project’s first half, features “A Coral Room,” a haunting meditation on memory and how it relates to her mother’s death. It’s among the most powerful performances she’s ever recorded.

The second half, A Sky of Honey, is intended to be experienced as a single, uninterrupted suite that follows the course of a day into night, complete with birdsong, painterly imagery, and soothing, rippling piano motifs. Not everyone will embrace the patience needed to commune with this one, but those who do may find themselves unexpectedly moved.

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5. Director's Cut (2011)

On paper, Director’s Cut is a decidedly niche curio, one that I almost didn’t include on this list to begin with. Bush re-recorded songs from The Sensual World and The Red Shoes, giving them fresh arrangements and vocals. She’s far from the only artist to go back and tinker with previous releases, but, in practice, it’s a revelation to compare and contrast these versions against the originals. In several cases, she makes a dramatic improvement.

Take a track like “This Woman’s Work,” already a heartbreaking slice of songcraft. In the Director’s Cut version, it benefits from a more profound sense of gravitas, primarily due to Bush’s more mature timbre. It’s not unlike what happened to Joni Mitchell’s work as she got older and her voice changed drastically. “The Song of Solomon” also overflows with a spiritual weariness that would’ve been impossible to fully consummate in the original version. Life experience and such. “Deeper Understanding,” about screen addiction, now feels even more prophetic than it did in 2011.

Director’s Cut is more than a simple cash-grab or nostalgia-baiting reclamation project. It’s a darkly compelling reframing from an artist in midlife revisiting themes from her past and, in most cases, seeing how the more everything changes, both geopolitically and technologically, the more it all stays the same. The re-recordings emphasize analog textures, slowed tempos, and a voice weathered by time, eschewing the digital polish that was Bush’s calling card for over a decade.

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4. The Dreaming (1982)

Occasionally dubbed “her mad album” (which, I dunno, I have a bit of a problem with, but we’ll get into that in a second), The Dreaming is when Kate Bush went full auteur and almost lost her audience. “Everyone thought I’d gone insane,” she said of the album’s tepid critical reception later. “People told me it was a commercial disaster, but it reached number three [on the UK Albums chart] so that’s their problem.” Too right.

Before conducting the research for this discography deep dive, I hadn’t listened to The Dreaming in its entirety in nearly 20 years. What struck me the most, going through the LP with fresh ears, was how aggressive it is in its expectation-shattering, even though Bush wasn’t without on-record idiosyncrasies before this. “Sat in Your Lap” rides a deranged carnival rhythm into existential inquiry, “Pull Out the Pin,” written from the POV of a dying Viet Cong soldier, trembles with razor-sharp menace, and the title track fuses didgeridoos with anti-colonial rage.

It’s also an album that’s breathtakingly prescient. Consider successful acts like Björk, Tori Amos, and Fiona Apple, and how they twist their vocals, gender, and narratives into an almost otherworldly brand of high-concept theater. Among other techniques, Bush sings backwards, loops herself into dissonant chaos, and, at one point, actually brays like a donkey.

It’s unhinged and, if you’re not prepared, possibly hard to get into at first. But, once you’ve heard it at least once, I promise it’ll be even harder to shake in the days, weeks, months, and years after.

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3. 50 Words for Snow (2011)

50 Words for Snow is slow, long, and hushed. At times, it feels like it’s evaporating into thin air as you play it. That’s not a criticism, either. Far from it. That’s its power. “I think one of the things I was playing with on the first three tracks was trying to allow the song structure to evolve the storytelling process itself,” she said during the press junket for the album. “So that it’s not just squashed into three or four minutes, so I could just let the story unfold.”

Clocking in at over an hour across just seven tracks, Snow is all about meditative minimalism. Soulful piano, brushed drums, and the occasional orchestral swell underscore tales that blur the line between folklore and fact, drawing on memory. Sometimes, tracks pivot at several points during their running time, like on “Misty,” a 13-minute tale of a love affair with a snowman that becomes an allegory for impermanence.

The anchor for me is “Snowed in at Wheeler Street,” an incredible duet with Elton John that plays like a ghostly reincarnation tragedy. It’s messy, raw, and utterly captivating. Seriously—the more I hear it, the more it threatens to dethrone a couple of songs I’ll mention in a second as my favorite Kate Bush tracks. If you haven’t checked it out, do yourself a favor and add it to your listening queue ASAP.

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2. The Sensual World (1989)

A good place to start when trying to explain the appeal of The Sensual World is its connection to Ulysses. Initially, Bush wanted to set Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from the original text to music and had already completed it (the title track) when she found out that James Joyce’s estate wouldn’t let her use the source material. His grandson stonewalled her for over a year despite repeated requests. So, she rewrote the text in her own words. Once it was released as the title track, it had morphed from a literary tribute into something much more emotionally intimate.

That sense of closeness is what makes The Sensual World an absolute marvel of songwriting and performance. As Bush widened her sonic palette, amplifying her sensual synths with Bulgarian vocal ensembles and uilleann pipes, she also let some of the more fantastical elements fade into the background. It’s a lush, tactile record that puts Bush the woman, not necessarily Bush the character, front and center. The result is arguably her most inviting and intelligent work to date.

Highlights include “The Fog,” a song that positively aches with generational memory, “Never Be Mine,” which yearns with restrained longing, and “Reaching Out,” which swells to a crescendo that will knock you out. If I’m honest, I nearly flipped the original script and ranked this LP at the top of Bush’s studio discography. It’s near-perfect in its execution.

But the only problem is, Bush has made a totally perfect album, too, and we can’t shun that one …

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1. Hounds of Love (1985)

What can be said that hasn’t already? Hounds of Love is one of the most important pop records ever made. Full stop.

Created after the commercial disappointment of The Dreaming, Bush self-financed the album and recorded it at her home studio, where she had complete control over every detail. That uncompromised vision is what really fuels this record’s success. It’s not pandering to its audience or trying to spoonfeed them ideas because there’s a lack of trust that they’ll “get it” or anything like that. Instead, you get an avant-garde pop opus that changed the game, not just for Bush, but for countless women who would walk down the trail she blazed.

The first side of Hounds is stacked with hits. "Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)," with its pulsing synth and desperate plea to swap emotional places with a lover, is one of the best songs of the 80s. "Cloudbusting" is a stirring tale of belief and loss centered on Wilhelm Reich and his son. The title track barrels forward with theatrical tension and ecstatic abandon, and "The Big Sky" is a joyful celebration of childlike wonder and elemental grandeur.

But it’s the second side that catapults this album into the rarified air occupied by those handful of perfect records that get released every decade. Beginning with “And Dream of Sheep,” The Ninth Wave is an operatic suite about a woman adrift at sea, hallucinating her past lives and future self. It’s a transcendental piece of work capped off by the arresting “Hello Earth,” the most beautiful track she has ever recorded, and “The Morning Fog,” an elegant note of quiet gratitude for human survival.

If you’ve never heard it, I envy your first time. If you have, then you already know it changed everything.