Patricia Lee Smith was born in Chicago in 1946, raised in New Jersey, and in 1967 moved to New York City, where she would become a legend of the ’70s punk scene and influence generations of rebellious bands and writers. Smith began reading her poetry with musical accompaniment by guitarist Lenny Kaye in 1971, and published her first poetry collection, Seventh Heaven, the following year.

Over the next few years, Smith and Kaye assembled a band with drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, pianist Richard Sohl, and bassist/guitarist Ivan Kral, combining rock with spoken word in incendiary performances at the East Village club CBGB. Clive Davis signed Smith to Arista Records, and her 1975 debut album Horses, produced by the Velvet Underground’s John Cale, drew on ’60s influences both esoteric and familiar while opening the door for other CBGB bands like the Ramones and Talking Heads to sign record deals and kickstart the punk era.

More from Spin:

• Madonna, Charli xcx Hit The Dancefloor
• The Weeknd Debuts New Song With Yoko Takahashi
• New Found Glory’s Chad Gilbert Dies Of Cancer

Only three of Smith’s early albums are credited to Patti Smith Group, but she’s continued to collaborate with the same core of musicians for decades, while Sohl died in 1990 and Kral died in 2020. Smith spent most of the 1980s out of the spotlight in Michigan, married and raising her two children, but returned in 1996 with renewed fire, recording several more albums.

On September 26, Smith will perform at the second year of the CBGB Festival, held at Brooklyn’s Under the K Bridge Park and named for the club that she helped make famous. What’s Patti Smith’s greatest album?

14. Twelve (2007)

On early albums like Horses, Smith would weave covers and original compositions together with remarkable results. On her covers album Twelve, however, Smith doesn’t take as many liberties with the source material, only dramatically overhauling Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” with an ominously slow arrangement and some additional new lyrics. Her renditions of the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” and Jimi Hendrix’s “Are You Experienced?” are sublime, but most of Twelve reveals little about the songs, Smith’s taste, or what her voice is capable of.

13. Killer Road with Soundwalk Collective and Jesse Paris Smith (2016)

Patti Smith hasn’t released a solo album since 2012, but over the past decade she has collaborated extensively with Soundwalk Collective, an experimental group founded by Stephan Crasneanscki. They first worked together, along with her daughter Jesse Paris Smith, on an album paying tribute to Nico, the German singer best known for her work with the Velvet Underground. The tracks on Killer Road are less songs than poetry recitations with avant garde musical backing, sometimes drawing on the lyrics of Nico’s later solo albums. Soundwalk Collective’s instrumentation is varied and intriguing, but the second half of the collection starts to drag around the point Patti Smith endlessly repeats the mantra “I will be seven when I meet you in Heaven.”

12. Gung Ho (2000)

Gil Norton (Pixies, Foo Fighters) produced Gung Ho, and the modern alt-rock sheen on the album doesn’t really suit Smith and her band, though “Persuasion” and the 11-minute title track are excellent. Unfortunately, a guitar solo from Television’s Tom Verlaine is wasted on one of the weakest songs, “Glitter in Their Eyes.” And regardless of how you feel about third-party politics, Smith’s campaign song for Ralph Nader’s 2000 presidential run, “New Party,” borders on self-parody. “She’s writing from the fighter inside her, when her best side has always been the flirt. Oh, there’s one half-hearted song sung in the voice of the temptress Salome, ‘Lo and Beholden,’ but that’s less a striptease than a parable of the price of art: ‘For beauty and the naked truth it will cost you.’ Then there’s ‘Strange Messengers,’ a power ballad about slavery, of all things, which is about as fun as Amistad—and half as subtle,” Sarah Vowell wrote in the SPIN review of Gung Ho.

11. Trampin’ (2004)

Bassist Tony Shanahan and drummer Oliver Ray joined Smith’s band when she began touring again in 1996, and eventually became significant collaborators on her later albums. Shanahan co-wrote “Mother Rose” and “Peaceable Kingdom,” two lovely midtempo standouts on Trampin’. And the close chemistry and loose improvisational energy shared by Smith and her band is captured well on her only fully self-produced album, which was largely recorded live in the studio.

10. Banga (2012)

Smith’s most recent solo album Banga, which she co-produced with Daugherty, Kaye, and Shanahan, builds on the intimate, spontaneous feel of Trampin’ with mellower arrangements and more guests, including Verlaine, Johnny Depp, and both of Smith’s children. “Amerigo” and “Constantine’s Dream” contemplate the exploration and exploitation of North America by Europeans, while other songs on Banga were inspired by Russian novelists Mikhail Bulgakov and Nikolai Gogol.

9. The Perfect Vision with Soundwalk Collective (2022)

In 2019 and 2020, Smith and Soundwalk Collective released a trilogy of albums, each celebrating a different French artist: theater legend Antonin Artaud on The Peyote Dance, poet Arthur Rimbaud on Mummer Love, and novelist Rene Daumal on Peradam. In 2022, all three of those albums, as well as a volume of remixes by Brian Eno and others, were released together as a box set. It’s probably the most ambitious project of Smith’s career, and there are occasional memorable melodic passages like “Ivry” and “The Rat,” but three hours of abstract poetry over minimalist soundscapes may be more than some listeners can handle.

8. Dream of Life (1988)

Patti Smith was semi-retired from writing and performing for most of her 14-year marriage, raising two children in Michigan and releasing only one album in that time. Her husband, MC5 guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith, co-wrote every song on Dream of Life and co-produced the album with Jimmy Iovine. It’s by far Patti Smith’s slickest album, and the single “People Have the Power” is almost childlike in its simplicity. But that direct and galvanizing lyric about the very essence of democracy has helped make it one of her most enduring songs, a perennial protest anthem. On modern CD and streaming editions of Dream of Life, the haunting “Going Under” is moved from track 2 to track 6, an unfortunate and unnecessary revision. “After nine years, you would expect Patti Smith to have grown as an artist, and she has. The imagery of her new lyrics reveals a high order of compression and heat. And if you thought she would never be much of a singer, think again,” Robert Palmer wrote in the Rolling Stone review of Dream of Life.

7. The Coral Sea with Kevin Shields (2008)

Smith’s boyfriend when she first began living in New York City in the late ’60s was photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who died in 1989. Smith’s 1996 book The Coral Sea was an epic poem written in homage to Mapplethorpe. A decade later, Smith recited the poem in London with musical accompaniment from Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine, recording the performances for a live album. Shields’s experiments with guitars and effects pedals made him a foundational figure of the shoegaze genre, and he conjures gorgeous sheets of melodic guitar fuzz as a backdrop for The Coral Sea. It’s probably Smith’s most passionate and powerful recording as a poet, building in intensity over the course of an hour. The double album features full recordings of two different 60-minute performances of the same material, one from 2005 and 2006, which feels a little redundant, but both are rewarding listens.

6. Gone Again (1996)

Patti Smith’s comeback album was a bittersweet affair, spurred by the 1994 deaths of her husband Fred “Sonic” Smith and her brother Todd Smith. The acoustic closing track “Farewell Reel” is particularly moving, and Patti Smith also mourns Kurt Cobain on the cathartic “About a Boy.” Reemerging shortly before her 50th birthday, Smith’s voice had changed and aged in her time away, gaining gravitas and expressive power on Gone Again. Unfortunately, the lead single “Summer Cannibals” sticks out like a sore thumb, as if Smith had a puzzling urge to make a “Werewolves of London”-style horror novelty hit.

5. Easter with Patti Smith Group (1978)

Early on his path to becoming one of the most powerful executives in the music industry, Jimmy Iovine was a recording engineer for Bruce Springsteen who was just beginning to transition into producing. Patti Smith’s first two albums were highly acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful, and when Iovine was hired to produce her third album, he was set on delivering a hit. So Iovine convinced Springsteen to let Smith finish writing a song he’d worked on for Darkness on the Edge of Town. “Because the Night” became the only Top 40 single of Smith’s career, and later an even bigger hit for 10,000 Maniacs. Easter is still pretty uncompromising for a crossover move—Smith wouldn’t be talked out of showing her armpit hair on the cover photo, or from using a racial slur in the title and chorus of the sixth track on the album. The latter decision hasn’t aged as well, and that song has been pulled from streaming services in recent years. “Horses changed my life, but I’ve recognized that there was something almost supernatural about the powers it tapped, that no artist or audience can expect that kind of baptism in the firmamental flames every time. So I don’t even feel bad about having to say that Easter is just a very good album,” Lester Bangs wrote in his review for Phonograph Record Magazine.

4. Peace and Noise (1997)

Michael Stipe, perhaps Patti Smith’s most devoted acolyte, persistently encouraged her to return to music. And once she finally did, they collaborated on R.E.M.’s 1996 hit “E-Bow the Letter” and Peace and Noise’s hypnotic closing track “Last Call.” Smith had another close friend to mourn in 1997 when Allen Ginsberg passed away, and she used words from his poem Footnote to Howl on “Spell.” “Don’t Say Nothing,” with Smith’s longtime drummer Daugherty co-writing and playing organ, is one of her absolute best post-’70s tracks, and the single “1959” brought Smith her first Grammy nomination.  

3. Wave with Patti Smith Group (1979)

As a producer, Todd Rundgren has guided a diverse array of artists to their finest albums, including the New York Dolls, Meat Loaf, and XTC. He didn’t quite make the same magic for Patti Smith, but Wave built confidently on the more commercial sound of Easter. Smith, at the height of her fame, covered “So You Want to Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star,” the Byrds’ funny and prescient 1967 hit about music industry machinery. And “Dancing Barefoot,” which missed the charts as a single in 1979, has gradually become one of Smith’s most popular and widely covered songs. 

2. Radio Ethiopia with Patti Smith Group (1976)

In 1976, Smith was in a relationship with Blue Oyster Cult’s Allen Lanier, and co-wrote and guested on the Long Island band’s platinum-selling album Agents of Fortune. Lanier and Smith wrote Radio Ethiopia’s “Distant Fingers” and the album was produced by Jack Douglas, then in the middle of a run of massive Aerosmith hits. The critics who rained praise on Horses may have been skeptical that Smith was trying to become a generic mainstream hard rocker, but Radio Ethiopia is a lean and vicious punk record, with some of Kaye’s best lead guitar work. “When it works, which is just about everywhere but the (eleven-minute) title track, this delivers the charge of heavy metal without the depressing predictability; its riff power–and the riffs are even better than the lyrics on this rockpoet experiment–has the human elan of a band that is still learning to play,” Robert Christgau wrote in the Village Voice review of Radio Ethiopia.

1. Horses (1975)

The first song on Horses is nominally a cover of Them’s 1965 hit “Gloria,” but Smith’s version is twice as long and contains additional words and music, including one of the most striking and iconic lines that’s ever opened a debut album: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.” On side 2, the remarkable nine-minute “Land” also builds up to an extended ’60s homage, riffing on “Land of a Thousand Dances” as made famous by Wilson Pickett. Bringing the raw sound of the Bowery bars to a major label release, with Verlaine assisting on “Break It Up,” Horses planted a flag for a new style of singing and literary songwriting that echoes throughout the punk and alternative bands of the ’70s, ’80s, and beyond. Even “Redondo Beach” is one of the earliest ancestors of the now enduring bond between punk rock and reggae. And even after other CBGB acts like Blondie and Talking Heads surpassed Smith on the charts, Horses stands on its own as a singular achievement, a punk poet’s wild stab at rock ‘n roll transcendence.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.