Best Ever
Punk Rock Album?

“Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” The opening line of Horses isn’t sung so much as declared—Patti Smith staking a claim before the band has even entered. When Lenny Kaye’s guitar finally arrives, distorted and deliberate, it sounds like permission: okay, now we can begin. But the statement has already been made. This album will not ask for absolution. It will not apologize for existing. It will take what it needs from rock and roll, from poetry, from the accumulated mythology of American outsiderdom, and it will not say thank you.

Smith was twenty-eight when Horses appeared in November 1975, already a fixture of the downtown New York scene that was coalescing around CBGB and Max’s Kansas City. She’d published poetry, performed with Kaye in configurations that blurred the line between reading and concert, developed a persona that drew equally on nineteenth-century French symbolism and twentieth-century garage rock. The album’s producer, John Cale—Velvet Underground cofounder, classically trained violinist, avatar of art-rock possibility—understood exactly what she was attempting. He gave her space to sprawl.

The sprawl is the point. “Birdland,” which occupies the album’s center, runs more than nine minutes, beginning as incantation and ending as glossolalia. Smith narrates the story of a boy waiting for his dead father to return in a spaceship—drawn from Peter Reich’s memoir about his father Wilhelm, the orgone-energy theorist—and the song becomes the waiting, stretches into it, refuses the resolution that pop structure would demand. The band follows her into abstraction and back out, Kaye and Richard Sohl and Ivan Kral and Jay Dee Daugherty creating a foundation stable enough to support whatever she needs to do on top of it.

“Land,” the three-part suite that closes side one, demonstrates the full range. It opens with “Horses,” a spoken-word piece about a boy named Johnny who gets pushed against a locker and enters a vision of horses, stallions, waves, the sea of possibility. It becomes “Land of a Thousand Dances,” the Chris Kenner song covered by everyone from Cannibal and the Headhunters to Wilson Pickett, here transformed into something feral and ecstatic. And it ends with “La Mer (de),” the tempo slowing, Smith’s voice dropping into something like grief. The whole thing takes ten minutes and earns every second.

Robert Mapplethorpe’s cover photograph—Smith in white shirt and jacket, skinny tie, androgynous and defiant—became as iconic as anything on the record. The image proposed a new category: not quite masculine, not performing femininity, something else that didn’t have a name yet. Punk would provide one kind of vocabulary. Queer theory would provide another. But in 1975, the photograph simply was, an assertion that required no explanation because explanation would diminish it.

The album’s influence tends to be discussed in terms of what came after: punk, new wave, riot grrrl, the entire tradition of women in rock who refused to be pretty first. This is accurate but incomplete. Horses also influenced what came before, retroactively. After hearing Smith channel Rimbaud through three chords, the Velvet Underground sounded less like an anomaly and more like a tradition. After hearing her transform “Gloria” from garage-rock standard into personal mythology, rock and roll’s relationship to poetry seemed less like aspiration and more like birthright.

The production has a rawness that feels intentional rather than budgetary. Cale, who’d overseen the Stooges’ The Stooges with similar economy, understood that Smith’s voice needed room—not the clinical clarity of professional recording but the presence of a body in a space. You can hear Electric Lady Studios on this record, the specific reverb of a room that Jimi Hendrix had built and died before finishing. The ghosts are part of the texture.

Smith would make other albums, some of them arguably more consistent: Easter with its hit single “Because the Night,” Wave with its Brian Wilson dedication, Gone Again with its elegies for husband Fred Smith and brother Todd. But Horses remains the essential document, the moment when the persona fully emerged. The twenty-eight-year-old who stood in front of Mapplethorpe’s camera knew exactly who she was. The album is her proof.

The closing track, “Elegie,” mourns Hendrix—another ghost, another spirit whose unfinished business haunts the studio. “I just don’t know what to do tonight,” Smith sings, and for once she sounds uncertain, the confidence of the opening declaration replaced by something more vulnerable. But even the uncertainty is a choice, a refusal to end on triumph when triumph would be easy. Horses earned the right to its grief. It earned everything it took.

Decide for Yourself:

• The Arista vinyl reissue restores the album’s original mastering, which has a warmth the CD versions sometimes lack.
• The 30th anniversary edition includes a second disc of Smith performing the album live in its entirety—a 2005 concert that demonstrates how the songs have aged and grown.
• Smith’s memoir Just Kids, documenting her relationship with Mapplethorpe through the years leading up to Horses, provides essential context.