Smith and her band composed the album's songs using simple chord progressions, while also breaking from punk tradition in their propensity for improvisation and embrace of ideas from avant-garde and other musical styles.

At the time of its release, Horses experienced modest commercial success and reached the top 50 of the Billboard 200 album chart, while being widely acclaimed by music critics.

[1][2] The hype surrounding the residency brought Smith to the attention of music industry executive Clive Davis, who was scouting for artists to sign to his recently launched label Arista Records.

For her debut album, her primary aim was to merge poetry and rock music, which then developed into a "larger mission" to "pump blood back into the heart of rock'n'roll".

[9] Smith had a change of heart and instead set out to enlist Welsh musician John Cale, formerly of the New York City rock band the Velvet Underground, to produce Horses after she was impressed by the raw sound of his solo albums, such as 1974's Fear.

[12] Allen Lanier of Blue Öyster Cult and Tom Verlaine of Television participated in the recording sessions as guest musicians, performing on the songs "Elegie" and "Break It Up", respectively.

[2][16] Lenny Kaye also highlighted the irreconcilable differences between their musical visions for the album, with Cale picturing "a more arranged record, one fleshed out with intriguing sound palettes and melodic lines", and Smith and her band preferring a more spontaneous approach to playing their material, akin to their live performances.

[12] The final album was ultimately informed by both perspectives, making use of multitracking and overdubbing on its more structured songs, while still capturing the musical improvisation that typified the band's live act.

[18]Cale said in 1996 that Smith initially struck him as "someone with an incredibly volatile mouth who could handle any situation", and that as producer on Horses he wanted to capture the energy of her live performances, noting that there "was a lot of power in Patti's use of language, in the way images collided with one another.

"[9] Smith would later attribute much of the tension between herself and Cale to her inexperience with formal studio recording, recalling that she was "very, very suspicious, very guarded and hard to work with" and "made it difficult for him to do some of the things he had to do.

[20] Consequence's Lior Phillips noted that the minimalist quality of the album's music "matched the tone of" the nascent punk rock genre,[21] which had emerged in New York City in the mid-1970s, and counted Smith, Television, and fellow CBGB regulars such as the Ramones as practitioners.

[24] Tarr wrote that the band "proudly flaunted a garage rock aesthetic" on Horses, while Smith "sang with the delirious release of an inspired amateur", emphasizing "honest passion" over technical proficiency.

[26] AllMusic critic Steve Huey observed that Horses borrowed ideas from the avant-garde, with the music showcasing the band's free jazz-inspired interplay and improvisation, while still remaining "firmly rooted in primal three-chord rock & roll.

[23] Throughout Horses, they also tempered their punk sound with elements of other musical styles, balancing more conventional rock songs with excursions into reggae ("Redondo Beach") and jazz ("Birdland").

[31] "Redondo Beach", whose lyrics concern a woman who commits suicide following a quarrel with the song's narrator,[32] was written by Smith after an incident involving her and her sister Linda.

"[48] In 2017, World Cafe presenter Talia Schlanger wrote that "Smith's unapologetic androgyny predates a time when that was an en vogue or even available option for women, and represents a seminal moment in the reversal of the female gaze.

[50] On September 18, 1975, the same day that they finished recording Horses, Smith and her band performed a promotional live concert at an Arista convention held at the New York City Center, where they were personally introduced by Clive Davis.

"[66] Reviewing the album for Rolling Stone, John Rockwell wrote that Horses is "wonderful in large measure because it recognizes the overwhelming importance of words" in Smith's work, covering a range of themes "far beyond what most rock records even dream of.

"[67] Rockwell highlighted Smith's adaptations of "Gloria" and "Land of a Thousand Dances" as the most striking moments on the record, finding that she had rendered the songs "far more expansive than their original creators could have dreamed.

"[67] In Creem, Lester Bangs wrote that Smith's music "in its ultimate moments touches deep wellsprings of emotion that extremely few artists in rock or anywhere else are capable of reaching", and declared that with "her wealth of promise and the most incandescent flights and stillnesses of this album she joins the ranks of people like Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, or the Dylan of 'Sad Eyed Lady' and Royal Albert Hall.

"[68] The Village Voice's Robert Christgau said that while the album does not capture Smith's humor, it "gets the minimalist fury of her band and the revolutionary dimension of her singing just fine.

[72] Steve Lake derided the album in Melody Maker as an embodiment of "precisely what's wrong with rock and roll right now", panning it as "completely contrived 'amateurism'" with a "'so bad it's good' aesthetic".

[73] Conversely, Jonh Ingham of Sounds penned a five-star review of Horses, naming it "the record of the year" and "one of the most stunning, commanding, engrossing platters to come down the turnpike since John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band".

[76] At the end of 1975, Horses was voted the second-best album of the year, behind Bob Dylan and the Band's The Basement Tapes, in the Pazz & Jop, an annual poll of American critics published in The Village Voice.

[78] According to writer Philip Shaw in his 33⅓ book profiling the album, the enthusiastic reaction to Horses from the music press quickly assuaged observers' suspicions that Smith had sold out by signing to a major label.

[91][92] "Pipping the Ramones' first album to the post by five months," Simon Reynolds wrote in The Observer, "Horses is generally considered not just one of the most startling debuts in rock history but the spark that ignited the punk explosion.

"[2] Horses has been described as a landmark for both punk and its offshoot genre new wave, inspiring "a raw, almost amateurish energy for the former and critical, engaging reflexivity for the latter", according to Chris Smith in his book 101 Albums That Changed Popular Music (2009).

[70] Variety critic David Sprague further noted that "Horses—which became the first major-label punk-rock album when Arista unleashed it in 1975—not only helped spread the gospel of Bowery art-punk around the world, it set the tone for smart, unbending female rockers of generations to come.

Viv Albertine of the Slits said that the album "absolutely and completely changed" her life, adding: "Us girls never stood in front of a mirror posing as if we had a guitar because we had no role models.

's Michael Stipe bought a copy of Horses as a high school student and later stated that the album "tore [his] limbs off and put them back on in a whole different order", citing Smith as his primary inspiration for becoming a musician.