The five hundred and fifty-eighth album: #557 Kate Bush - Hounds of Love
With a partner who's a massive fan of Kate Bush, I've heard a lot already and have a lot of affinity for her work. The first side of the album pays that off - Running Up That Hill is a deserved classic (long before Stranger Things made it cool) and Cloudbusting is just so amazingly memorable. There's a lot of depth in those tracks that really resonates. The other side are their collection of tracks for a concept album, immediately starting with a more wistful sound that sets up more of a story than entirely having those feelings in the moment. Under Ice really builds on that, feeling like panic throughout. Waking the Witch, too, reaches that discomfort - although here from its discordant, deliberately fragmented nature. The Irish music it builds up to is as interesting as it invokes a link to nature in its lyrics that builds on a folksy feeling. It moves a lot between the emotions, but it manages to combine the different sounds and emotions with the story it's trying to tell in the arc the songs go through.