Thanks to season four of Stranger Things, Kate Bush’s song, “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God),” has topped the charts, 37 years after its release. Nate Rogers takes a look at how this happened, and what it means for the music industry, and especially older, legacy acts.
Drenched in gated reverb and woozy synths, the song is also an ideal track to sonically fit into the retro sound that the show has so carefully curated. “It’s working on all of these levels of reference, both internally to the episode, to the larger series, to our sort of collective nostalgia of what the 1980s feel like,” says Harding.