Denervating the human kidney to improve blood pressure control is an old therapeutic concept first applied on a larger scale by surgeons in the 1920s. With the advent of modern pharmacology and the development of powerful drugs to lower blood pressure, approaches to directly target the sympathetic nerves were more or less abandoned. Over the last 3-4 years however, we have witnessed enormous renewed interest in novel and minimally invasive device-based approaches to specifically target the renal nerves. The enthusiasm is fuelled by promising results from proof-of-concept studies and clinical trials demonstrating convincing blood pressure lowering effects in the majority of treated patients, and perhaps even more so by observations indicating potential additional benefits relating to common co-morbidities of hypertension, such as impaired glucose metabolism, renal impairment, left ventricular hypertrophy, and others. Current findings will be reviewed and put into context and areas of future research will be highlighted.