Smashing Pumpkins
Watch Smashing Pumpkins Play New Single ‘Beguiled’ on Fallon
Smashing Pumpkins played their new single “Beguiled” on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon last night (Sept. 23), showcasing the guitar-heavy lead single from their recently announced upcoming album ATUM. The new project is billed as a rock opera and a sequel to the Pumpkins’ 1995 album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and 2000’s Machina/The Machines of God. ATUM is broken into three separate 11-song installments: act one is out Nov. 15, act two on Jan. 31, 2023 and act three on April 21, 2023. Fans can also pre-order a special boxed set with all 33 tracks plus 10 additional unreleased songs. Billy Corgan plans to reveal each of ATUM‘s 33 tracks chronologically through his newly launched podcast Thirty-Three with William Patrick Corgan. The firs...
Smashing Pumpkins Go Rock Opera on 33-Track, Three-Installment New Album
The Smashing Pumpkins will release their next album, a three-act rock opera dubbed ATUM (pronounced “autumn”), in three different installments over the next five months, and are previewing the 33-track project with “Beguiled,” which is out now. The Pumpkins gave fans a preview of “Beguiled” earlier on Tuesday when they took to TikTok to perform it live. Frontman Billy Corgan wrote and produced ATUM over the past four years, and envisioned the album as a sequel to the band’s 1995 album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and the 2000 effort Machina/The Machines of God. ATUM is broken into three separate 11-song installments: act one is out Nov. 15, act two on Jan. 31, 2023 and act three on April 21, 2023. Fans can also pre-order a special boxed set with all 33 tracks plus 10 ad...
Billy Corgan and Chloé Mendel on Highland Park Fundraiser, Reclaiming ‘Space in the Community’
The shooting in Highland Park, Illinois during a Fourth of July parade, which left seven people dead and 46 others wounded, became a tragedy that the entire nation felt. But for Billy Corgan and his partner, Chloé Mendel, it hit much closer to home — quite literally. “When you go through this, it’s like you don’t want to walk past where this happened,” Corgan tells SPIN over Zoom. “I mean, we were there last night eating ice cream literally right beneath where the shooter was. We’re there all the time, and we have to reclaim our space in the community.” That reclamation is why the two owners of the neighborhood’s tea shop and plant-based emporium, Madame ZuZu’s, are hosting Together and Together Again — A Benefit for the Highland Park Community Foundation, a live-streamed concert to r...
Zeds Dead, NGHTMRE, More to Perform at Summer Camp Music Festival 2022
Summer Camp Music Festival has something for everyone on this year’s lineup. After a dazzling 20th anniversary outing, the minds behind the beloved Illinois festival are looking to make an even bigger splash in 2022. With dubstep, hip-hop, jam bands, experimental electronic music and more, Summer Camp’s 2022 lineup is an eclectic celebration of live music. As shown in the embedded lineup, Summer Camp Music Festival 2022 will feature headline performances from Zeds Dead, NGHTMRE, Liquid Stranger, STS9, Smashing Pumpkins, as well as three days of jamming from Umphrey’s McGee and moe. Set to join are Moore Kismet, Malaa, 1788-L, BLVK JVCK, Wreckno, A Hundred Drums, Dirt Monkey, Jantsen and many more. The 21st chapter of Summer Camp Music Festival is scheduled for May 27-29, ...
The 90 Greatest Albums of the ’90s
This article originally appeared in the September 1999 issue of SPIN. “You must be high.” We heard that a lot during the time we spent preparing this issue. Which is understandable. Pronouncing the 90 greatest albums of the ’90s is a somewhat presumptuous thing to do. When you’re measuring the music this decade is offering to history—the sounds we partied with, copulated to, fought about, and wept over—everyone has an opinion. That ours should be more valid than yours is debatable. But hey—it’s our magazine. What, then, you ask, constitutes “greatest”? Don’t even start. Suffice it to say that, after much heated discussion and countless veiled insults, it came down to the factors of both remarkable artistry and cultural shock value. Sometimes a record’s knock-you-off-your-Skechers impa...
William Patrick Corgan, Noted Cat Person, Unveils Unreleased Christmas Songs For PAWS Chicago
This time last year, William Patrick Corgan said that he’d been working on a Christmas album for a few years that got “junked.” Now, it appears the Smashing Pumpkins singer/guitarist has taken some of those songs out of the proverbial trash. During the annual Christmas show at Madame ZuZu’s, his vegan tea shop in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, Corgan played two unreleased seasonal songs — “Evergreen” and “The Magi And The Shiny Bright” — on an acoustic guitar. He also played “Do You Hear What I Hear?” with his three-year-old daughter Philomena who walked off the stage mid-song. [embedded content][embedded content] It’s unclear whether this was a one-off, or whether Corgan has serious plans to revisit his yuletide project (which we hope is the case). “I had written some songs, and I h...
Watch Billy Corgan Break Out 35-Year-Old Rarities for Acoustic Performance
When William Patrick Corgan announced that he’d be performing four acoustic sets at Madame ZuZu’s Emporium — the tea shop he owns in Chicago — they were billed as “William Patrick Corgan Early Years 1985-1990.” For those who struggle with calendars, that means it’s all pre-Gish, and thus before the Billy Corgan that fans have come to know and love over the last three decades both with and without the Smashing Pumpkins (although Corgan and guitarist James Iha technically formed the band and began performing together in 1988). Described on the official Eventbrite page as “a unique and intimate evening of story and song,” the two weekends made good on their promise of exploring Corgan’s “early years as a musician and songwriter with music written between 1985-1990 when he was a fledgling arti...
Watch Smashing Pumpkins Play ‘Quiet’ for the First Time Since 1994
The Smashing Pumpkins made their return to the stage in their hometown of Chicago Friday night as a Riot Fest 2021 headliner. The set marked their first full concert since August 2019, and in addition to live-debuting a few songs from their latest album CYR (“The Colour of Love,” “Ramona” and “Wyttch”), Billy Corgan and company also took the opportunity to dust off the Siamese Dream favorite “Quiet” — a song that was a setlist staple during the Siamese Dream touring era then was abruptly canned in 1994. They also played “United States” off 2007’s Zeitgeist for the first time since 2015. A festival goer filmed the “Quiet” performance in full, which you can watch below. [embedded content] On Sunday, the Smashing Pumpkins are set to take the stage at Asbury Park, New Jerse...
The 40 Greatest Music Video Artists
Music videos are the perfect bastard child of art and commerce, even more than pop music itself. A promotional visual accompaniment to a popular song doesn’t need a coherent narrative (although on rare occasions, they do). It just needs to suit the song, sell the record, and possibly make the artist look cool. But since the launch of MTV 40 years ago this week, a select few recording artists have helped raise music videos to an art form — sometimes by accident, and sometimes by carefully curating the work of brilliant directors like Mark Romanek, Hype Williams, and Spike Jonze. Here are 40 artists from the last four decades that helped video kill the radio star. 40. Lil Kim [embedded content] Although earlier female MCs like Salt-N-Pepa and Queen Latifah used music videos to help launch th...
Smashing Pumpkins: Our 1991 Feature
This article was originally published in the December 1991 issue of SPIN. Smashing Pumpkins were one of our Artist of the Year runner-ups. In honor of Gish turning 30, we’re republishing this article. With its simultaneously childlike and ferocious debut album, gish (Caroline Records), the Chicago-based hard-soft psychedelia foursome Smashing Pumpkins exploded onto the 1991 indie-rock landscape with all the messy orange furor of its namesake. Even though the group disavowed any overt connections to Halloween or related vandalisms, the trick-or-treat dichotomy has proven to be a recurring theme during the Pumpkins’ short but illustrious career. Singer-guitarist-mastermind Billy Corgan, guitarist James lha, bassist D’Arcy Wretzky, and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin thrive on co...
Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan on Gish Influencing Pearl Jam and Nirvana
Billy Corgan is only too happy to talk about the influence the Smashing Pumpkins’ Gish LP — 30 years old this year — had on the burgeoning alt-rock scene. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Corgan said, “I remember having a conversation with Eddie Vedder when we were on tour with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He told me how much of an influence Gish was on their first record.” Others, too, were fans of the Chicago foursome, Corgan said. “Through the years, I’ve talked to many, many people who really pointed to Gish as the game-changer in their mind about how to approach guitar and how to record.” Gish, produced by Butch Vig and Corgan in 1990-1991, “had a lot to do with how Nevermind was recorded,” Corgan says. Vig produced that album for Nirvana, also in 1990-1991. ...
Smashing Pumpkins Celebrate 30th Anniversary of Gish With Livestream Event and Chicago Collaborations
Six months after releasing their latest double album, CYR, Smashing Pumpkins are back with a throwback to the very beginning of the band. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of their groundbreaking debut album, Gish, Billy Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlin will be hosting a two-hour livestream on Saturday, May 29. The livestream will feature a Q&A, Gish listening party, and an exclusive preview of unreleased music. With any luck, that unreleased music will be a tease of the upcoming 80-track Machina II rework that Corgan mentioned in January. The legendary band is further embracing the digital age by encouraging fans to share their favorite Gish memories online and hosting a digital scavenger hunt on their social media platforms, which will see the winner rec...
