“Sinister new wave triumph”? Running Up That Hill is NOT “sinister”. I think the author [sic] of this piece is getting it confused with Stranger Things.
I’ve also seen it described as her “warped” new wave track. It wasn’t warped, either. It was Kate writing about how men and women swapping places would help them understand each other better.
It wasn’t “new wave”, either. Yes, it was a new style of music, but “new wave” in the late 70s and early 80s was a term reserved specifically for punk-rock tracks. Kate’s about as far away from punk as an artist can get.
Neither is Kate’s music “un-wieldy”, which means cumbersome and awkward. Her music and her vocals have always been ethereal, which is fundamentally opposite to “un-wieldy”. It’s one of the elements that made her stand out.
What exceptionally lazy writing. Obviously, the writers of these pieces weren’t there at the time and are making apparently definitive statements based on nothing but their own baseless assumptions.