Patti Smith - Horses - Dapple Grey Vinyl (National Album Day 2025)

Horses celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. A truly iconic album and cited as the first punk rock album, this version uses the original master (not the 50th anniversary remaster which is in the 2LP 50th Anniversary edition) and comes on a dapple grey colour vinyl. 'Horses' is the debut studio album by American musician Patti Smith, released in November 1975. It isn't hard to make the case for Patti Smith as a punk rock progenitor based on her debut album, which anticipated the new wave by a year or so: the simple, crudely played rock & roll, featuring Lenny Kaye's rudimentary guitar work, the anarchic spirit of Smith's vocals, and the emotional and imaginative nature of her lyrics - all prefigure the coming movement as it evolved on both sides of the Atlantic. Producer John Cale respected Smith's primitivism in a way that later producers did not, and the loose, improvisatory song structures worked with her free verse to create something like a new spoken word/musical art form: 'Horses' was a hybrid, the sound of a post-Beat poet, as she put it, 'dancing around to the simple rock & roll song'.