Marcel Winatschek

Running With the Horses

"Only the Horses" arrived in early 2012 as the lead single from Magic Hour, the Scissor Sisters’ fourth album, and it was immediately clear they’d moved somewhere new. The song opens on a wash of synth that feels lifted from a different decade entirely—late-eighties Italo disco, or the kind of track that scores the closing credits of a film you can almost name. Jake Shears sings it like someone genuinely uncertain whether what he’s running toward is freedom or just another version of running. That’s usually the better kind of uncertainty to put in a song. It sticks.