Album Review | ‘50 Words for Snow’ by Kate Bush

After a decade hiatus from the industry, Bush returns with an arresting collection of works surrounding winter’s mystery.

Album art courtesy of Fish People records.

Kate Bush’s legacy now spans generations. Where older listeners remember her from her breakthrough siren song “Wuthering Heights,” a new generation has discovered songs like “Army Dreamers” and “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” through TikTok and Stranger Things. It’s been over a decade since Bush has released any original music of her own.

Her last album, 50 Words for Snow, shows how her songwriting skills can still mesmerize an audience with the same power that her early hits instilled a generation before. Spurred by the creative process behind the reinvention of tracks from The Sensual World and The Red Shoes in Directors Cut, themes surrounding snow began to form a loose web of longer-form tracks that display hope and whimsy.

Kate confessed to The Quietus that she wanted to focus more on storytelling on this album:

“I think it’s much more a kind of narrative story-telling piece. 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 story telling process itself; so that it’s not just squashed into three or…