Chicago, IL · alt-rock

The Smashing Pumpkins

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Chicago's alt-rock monument — Mellon Collie-scale guitars at home in Grant Park, Corgan drama at full wingspan.

The Smashing Pumpkins formed in Chicago in 1988 after Billy Corgan's earlier band, the Marked, broke up and he returned to his home city, taking a job in a record store where he met guitarist James Iha. The two began writing songs indebted to the Cure and New Order, played their first show that July with only a drum machine for rhythm, and were soon joined by bassist D'arcy Wretzky and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin to complete the original line-up.

Their sound set layered, heavily overdubbed guitars against Corgan's thin, nasal voice, drawing on heavy metal, shoegaze and psychedelia in roughly equal measure, an approach that set them apart from most of their alternative-rock contemporaries. Over time the palette widened further, taking in gothic rock, grunge, progressive rock and electronica as well.

Gish and Siamese Dream established the band, and the 1995 double album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness pushed the scale further still, spanning acoustic ballads and distorted rock singles; it debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 and was certified Diamond. Adore and the two-part Machina project followed before internal conflict, drug use and falling sales brought the group's initial run to an end in 2000, by which point they had sold some 30 million albums worldwide.

Corgan revived the name in 2006 with Chamberlin for the album Zeitgeist, touring with new guitarist Jeff Schroeder before Chamberlin left again in 2009. Corgan kept working through a rotating cast of musicians under the banner Teargarden by Kaleidyscope, a run that produced the albums Oceania and Monuments to an Elegy.

Chamberlin returned as a touring member in 2015 and rejoined properly alongside Iha in 2018, the lineup that made Shiny and Oh So Bright, Cyr and the three-part Atum before Schroeder's departure in 2023 left Corgan, Iha and Chamberlin as the group's current core.

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alt-rock