Last week, the Smashing Pumpkins announced their new album, a 33-song “rock opera” titled ATUM. The album will be arriving in three parts: the first instalment being in November, the second in January next year and the third next April. They announced the album alongside its lead single, a gritty, riff-heavy rocker titled ‘Beguiled’.
The band were musical guests on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Friday, 23rd September, where they performed ‘Beguiled’. Watch the Pumpkins – whose current lineup consists of mainstay Billy Corgan, founding members James Iha and Jimmy Chamberlin, and guitarist Jeff Schroeder – play below.
The Smashing Pumpkins Play ‘Beguiled’ on Fallon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuQaPt8Q-Sk
ATUM has been teased by Corgan and co. for some time. The expansive trilogy will be the band’s 12th studio album, will follow up 2020’s CYR, and will serve as a sequel to seminal 1995 double-album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and 2000’s Machina/The Machines of God.
Speaking to Kerrang! about the forthcoming album earlier this month, Corgan said it goes in a “million different directions,” with about “a third of the record” being similar to the heavier nature of ‘Beguiled’. “A third is kind of more similar to what we’ve been doing recently, and I don’t know what the other third would be called. I guess probably more esoteric to do with the musical.”
Corgan continued: “It seems to strike a really nice balance for me when I listen to it. It doesn’t feel like there’s too much of any one thing, which was important to me. I wanted not to be repetitive, because as you can imagine, over 33 songs if you become repetitive, that’s the reason it gets turned it off. So I was determined to not overly do anything.”
Further Reading
REVIEW: The Smashing Pumpkins – ‘Shiny And Oh So Bright Vol. 1 / LP: No Past. No Future. No Sun’
For Fans Of: The Smashing Pumpkins | Get To Know Melbourne’s Bad Juju
Watch Alison Wonderland Put Her Own Spin On A Smashing Pumpkins Classic
