Why Music Is the Heart of Stranger Things - From Kate Bush to the Final Season

Why the 80s Isn’t a Trend Jump for Stranger Things

Set between 1983 and 1989, Stranger Things exists in a pre-digital world where music isn’t disposable. You don’t stream a song once and forget it. You buy the record. You play it again and again. You build identity around it.

That’s crucial to the show’s storytelling.

In the 80s:

• Music was deeply personal
• Songs carried emotional weight because they were hard-won
• A track could become a lifeline, a shield, or a memory you clung to

The Duffer Brothers understood this from the start. The soundtrack doesn’t just set the mood  it moves the plot, defines characters, and, at times, literally keeps them alive.

Kate Bush and Max: When a Song Becomes a Lifeline

Few moments in modern TV history have embedded a song into narrative quite like Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)”.

For Max Mayfield, the song isn’t a needle drop. It’s armour.

As she spirals under the weight of grief and guilt, Max retreats inward — headphones on, world out. In the context of the show’s mythology, music becomes a tether to reality, anchoring her to who she is and who she loves. Kate Bush’s track doesn’t just accompany her escape from Vecna — it is the escape.

The choice is devastatingly perfect:

• Released in 1985, exactly right for the timeline
• Lyrically obsessed with emotional distance, misunderstanding, and the desire to swap places
• Sonically urgent, anxious, and euphoric all at once

It’s a song about inner turmoil, played at a moment when inner turmoil becomes a physical threat. That’s not nostalgia - that’s storytelling precision.

The cultural ripple effect was instant, but what mattered most was that the song earned its place. Fans didn’t rediscover Kate Bush because the show told them to. They rediscovered her because the moment demanded it.

When Pop Icons Enter the Upside Down: Prince and Power

By Season 5, Stranger Things widened its musical palette, and with it, its emotional scope. The inclusion of Prince was a standout not just because he’s iconic, but because what he represents fits the story perfectly.

Prince’s music in the 80s was:

• Confident, confrontational, and genre-defying
• A challenge to authority and expectation
• Deeply tied to identity and self-expression

That energy mirrors the characters as they grow older, more fractured, and more self-aware. The stakes are bigger. The innocence is fading. The music follows suit.

This is where Stranger Things really shows its hand: it doesn’t use hits to remind you of the past, it uses them to show change.

The Cast, the Music, and Creative Spillover

There’s something fitting about a show so rooted in music spawning a cast deeply engaged in it beyond the screen.

Several Stranger Things actors have explored creative side projects - including music - reflecting the same DIY, expressive spirit that defined the era the show celebrates. That crossover between acting, music, and identity feels entirely in keeping with the 80s ethos: make something, share it, mean it.

Joe Kerry with the massively popular Djo, Finn Wolfhard, Maya Hawke and Jamie Campbell with some solo tracks, but he was also part of the now disbanded band Counterfeit.  All deepening the relationship between the cast, the series and music, showcasing how intrinsic and interlinked it all is.

The show doesn’t just celebrate the decade, it inspires the same creative curiosity it depicts.

The Music That Made Stranger Things Endure

What Stranger Things ultimately proved is that music isn’t nostalgia when it’s used with intent - it’s memory, identity, and survival.

Kate Bush’s role in Max’s storyline remains the show’s most emotionally precise use of music: a song not chosen for recognition, but for resonance. It captured grief, fear, and the fragile hope of escape in a way dialogue never could. That moment alone cemented the series’ reputation for treating music as narrative, not decoration.

As the story progressed, the soundtrack matured with its characters. By the final season, the inclusion of Prince felt inevitable rather than surprising - an artist whose work has always lived in contrast and confidence, perfectly suited to a story about stepping out of childhood and into something harder, louder, and more resolved.

Across five seasons, Stranger Things built a complete musical arc from refuge, to expression, to acceptance. The 1980s weren’t a stylistic shortcut; they were the emotional framework that made the story believable.

Now finished, the series stands as a reminder of how powerful music can be when it’s allowed to matter.

For fans who want to revisit that journey, the Stranger Things Season 5 soundtrack is available to buy, capturing the final chapter of a show that never treated its music as background noise — but as part of the story itself.