Five decades after it became a landmark of a sea change of '70s rock, Patti Smith's debut Horses will be expanded with previously unheard material.

Horses (50th Anniversary Edition), available through Legacy Recordings on October 10, will pair the classic LP with a further nine alternate versions and outtakes from the album sessions, including two selections from Smith's demo tape for RCA Records. (Arista, unaffiliated with RCA at the time, ended up signing her for about a quarter-century.) A demo version of standout "Redondo Beach" was released on a 2002 compilation, but the others here - including the preview track "Snowball" and a cover of The Marvelettes' "The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game" - are heard here for the first time. The deluxe Horses, available on CD, vinyl and digitally, prefaces the publication of Smith's new memoir, Bread of Angels, in November. (Smith's deliberate recording pace - one album in the '80s, two in the '90s and four from 2000 to 2012 - has been complemented by the spectacular prose of autobiographical books including 2010's Just Kids, an account of her romance and friendship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, and 2015's M Train.)

By the time Smith took an offer from Clive Davis to join the Arista roster and recorded Horses with ex-Velvet Underground member John Cale in the producer's chair, it seemed she'd already lived several lifetimes. The daughter of a Jehovah's Witness family in New Jersey, she crossed the river to New York after giving a daughter up for adoption, beginning a life of striking art from poetry to plays (including a one-act written with Sam Shepard), collaborations with Blue Oyster Cult, music journalism and a day job on an assembly line. When she began setting her poems to music with the help of a band that included guitarist and Nuggets compiler Lenny Kaye, bassist Ivan Kral, drummer Jay Dee Daughtery and pianist Richard Sohl, she'd soon become a fixture at the Lower East Side club CBGB, where Davis spotted her on a bill with Television.

Characterized by its push-pull of Smith and band's raw energy and Cale's vision to record something more subdued, Horses is an opening salvo for the ages, eulogizing the demises of pivotal late '60s musical figures from Jim Morrison to Jimi Hendrix through a barrage of raw originals and a few combined with metatextual covers. Opener "Gloria: In Excelsis Deo," which begins with the immortal opening line "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine," integrates the Van Morrison-penned rave-up "Gloria," while "Land" mashes "Land of a Thousand Dances" within its musical borders. Horses, a critical favorite as well as a modest commercial success, has been cited by R.E.M., The Smiths, Siouxsie and The Banshees and Courtney Love as a vital musical text, and kicked off a career full of unlikely highs like the Top 10 hit "Because the Night," a Bruce Springsteen outtake with new, aching lyrics by Smith, plus rock standards like "Dancing Barefoot" and "People Have the Power."

Horses (50th Anniversary Edition) (Arista/Legacy, 2025)

2CD: Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. / Amazon Canada
2LP: Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. / Amazon Canada

CD/LP 1: Original album (released as Arista AL 4066, 1975)

1. Gloria: In Excelsis Deo
2. Redondo Beach
3. Birdland
4. Free Money
5. Kimberly
6. Break it up
7. Land: Horses/Land of a Thousand Dances/La Mer(de)
8. Elegie

CD/LP 2: Bonus material (previously unreleased except where noted)

1. Gloria: In Excelsis Deo (RCA Demo)
2. Redondo Beach (RCA Demo) (released on Land (1975-2002) - Arista 07822 14708-2, 2002)
3. Birdland (Alternate)
4. Snowball
5. Kimberly (Alternate)
6. Break It Up (Alternate)
7. Distant Fingers
8. The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game
9. We Three