“No Horses”, a stand-alone single released a year after alt-rockers Garbage’s sixth album Strange Little Birds (2016), is an apocalyptic, direct and relentless blend of electronica, punk, industrial rock, and grunge. Vocalist Shirley Manson, drummer Butch Vig, guitarist Steve Marker and bassist Duke Erikson contrast slower moments of morose introspection with a panic-inducing pounding alarm to deliver one dire warning after another, describing an Orwellian dystopia characterized by heightened surveillance, military rule and the perpetual threat of state-sanctioned violence: ‘And no more security/ There will be no cops/ Just men with guns/ In their shiny black uniforms/ And their big black boots/ With their shiny black batons/ And their sleek black cars/ With their fingers on the trigger’.
Like Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945), Manson singles out the horse as a point of sympathetic identification. One might assume that ‘a sky full of tears’ and ‘all the lovers turn cops’ would be the most devastating feature of a fatalistic vision of the future, but Manson opts to single out the disappearance of horses in the track’s chorus: ‘‘And no more horses, no horses/ There'll be no horses, no more motorcades’.
In an interview with Variety, she explained that the horse, to her, maintains a sense of beauty and value despite undergoing a loss of utility. In an unromantic, hyper-capitalist future, horses stand in for everything that will be coldly cast side in the narrow pursuit of profits:
“I was driving through the Scottish countryside last year and looking at these fields of horses and thinking, what will happen to them when we don’t need them as much as we once did? When they’re no longer working beasts, what will happen to the horses? So it’s an imagining of the future where the authorities destroy anything that doesn’t make large amounts of money.”
Manson also described the song as being “very un-Garbage like”, despite it falling squarely in line with the band’s tradition for reacting to the world’s darker revelations with rage, sadness, and provocative defiance.
