“Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness:” the Defining Smashing Pumpkins Album

Let us harken back to the days when grunge morphed into something far more chaotic and poetic, in honor of the album's 30th anniversary.

This album review examines the legacy of one of the biggest (literally) 90s alt-rock records for its 30th anniversary.

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Genre: Alternative, Rock, Metal

Label: EMI

Release Date: October 23, 1995

Vibe: 🔨🎃

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👉 Click the GIF to stream the album on your favorite platform

To appreciate how compelling and enriching a listening experience Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is, look no further than the Smashing Pumpkins’ 2023 release, Atum. Stretching across three discs and clocking in at nearly 140 minutes, it’s a slog of a rock opera, one that makes you sift through every piece of sonic rubble, only to realize, like Humphrey Bogart’s character in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, that there ain’t no gold in these hills. Billy Corgan, the central creative force behind the band’s work, sounded tired and, oddly enough, for such a long, elaborate record, without much substance to say. I remember listening to that album, longing for the Mellon Collie days. It’s a weird, uneven mess of a double LP, but it’s the good kind of mess. It tries to wrap its arms around so much, being equally obsessed with the wonders of the cosmos and the soul-sucking nature of suburban life. Everything it feels, it feels deeply, in the most dramatic possible sensibility. It’s a record for misfits, made by misfits.

Influenced by The Wall and The White Album, the Smashing Pumpkins went into this project deliberately trying to move as far away from what they’d experienced on Siamese Dreams. That album, produced by grunge luminary Butch Vig, was labor-intensive and, depending on who you ask, exhausting due to Corgan’s need to control every last aspect of the recording sessions. Despite the success of Siamese Dreams, the group chose not to bring Vig back. Instead, they hired Flood and Alan Moulder as co-producers. As Corgan told Guitar World in 1995, “I think it was a situation where we’d become so close to Butch that it started to work to our disadvantage... I just felt we had to force the situation, sonically, and take ourselves out of normal Pumpkin recording mode. I didn’t want to repeat past Pumpkin work.”

The band began laying down new material in a rehearsal space, rather than a studio setting. Flood insisted that they set aside dedicated jam session time daily to work out new ideas, which made the process far more collaborative than it had been previously. Corgan has said the most significant improvement was cutting out weeks of idle time they lost while instrumental overdubs were nitpicked to death. Other members, like guitarist James Iha, tell a slightly different story. “The big change is that Billy is not being the big ‘I do this—I do that.’ It’s much better. The band arranged a lot of songs for this record, and the songwriting process was organic.” From a historical perspective, rejecting past norms was the right call. In 1995, grunge was fading fast, ceding more of the mainstream spotlight to outsized pop and hip-hop. They could’ve run it back and done more of the same, but, to avoid becoming irrelevant in that moment, they went for unfiltered alternative maximalism.

Mellon Collie primarily lives on through its hit singles and the accompanying music videos, all of which were in heavy rotation on MTV during its initial run. The most enduring of those is undoubtedly “Tonight, Tonight,” which frames Corgan’s cracking vocals with soaring orchestral strings (shout-out to the Chicago Symphony). A lot has been written about the dark, more juvenile side of this double LP, some of which I’ll get to in a second, but “Tonight, Tonight” cuts through the band’s supposedly ironclad cynicism and lifts you into an emotional space that resembles hope, if not something greater. Then you have “1979,” which isn’t of the exact same ilk, but it’s not a saw-toothed scream-along like “Bullet With Butterfly Wings.” It radiates a glow of nostalgia for one’s youth, even as it barely conceals its contempt for the places and characters that populate those memories. There’s a moment in its award-winning music video where a bunch of teenagers drive out into the desert and hike up to this picturesque viewpoint, all so they can yell obscenities down on their city, middle fingers in the air.

The most fascinating meta-text on Mellon Collie is “Zero,” Corgan’s kinda-sorta dismantling of his rock star status. The overall notion (that such an indulgence in his ego can only lead to hollowed-out insides) initially plays as apathy, but, eventually, he pulls back the curtain a little more than he intended to, giving us a glimpse at his genuine state of mind, not some put-upon Gen X theater. “You blame yourself for what you can’t ignore,” he sings at one point. “You blame yourself for wanting more.” Wanting more what, exactly? Fame and fortune? Connection beyond the confines of his rising (and potentially suffocating) celebrity? Respect for your creative output as an artist? The fact that the song never picks a clear side ends up being the most accurate distillation of Corgan’s views from the pedestal fans had put him on. The nihilism would be more believable if you didn’t get the sense that, underneath all the posturing, he enjoys the rock god lifestyle. Or, perhaps more accurately, relishes the fact that he can be a contrarian to the broadest possible audience. That level of indirect revelation will never not be entertaining.

All that said, the most influential cuts off Mellon Collie may be the more outre material, as Corgan himself has observed. Like the official singles, they’re all over the map when it comes to intensity, style, and subtlety. “Thirty‑Three” softens the record with an acoustic confession that sounds older, wiser, and steadier, counteracting some of the more teenage-level angst. “X.Y.U.” sits at the opposite end of the spectrum, going positively feral for seven minutes. Drum legend Jimmy Chamberlin, the perpetually underrated glue that holds a lot of Smashing Pumpkins songs together, does a lot to push the track into jaw-dropping chaos. “Porcelina of the Vast Oceans” is my favorite of the oddities, nine minutes of dream and myth, chasing sonic scale from hushed murmurs to epic crashes. You also have the title tracks, two instrumentals that open and close the record, bookends that frame the overall narrative nicely by hinting at the post-rock ambition. The first plays like a lullaby, the second like a requiem. They’re quiet reminders of how constructed and deliberate a world this is, one that pulls as much from Chopin and Debussy as Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath.

If you’ve never listened to Mellon Collie in its entirety, don’t expect to “get it” all in one sitting. Art of this grandiose nature rarely allows for instantaneous reactions to be drawn from it. It’s more like reading someone’s diary entries from front to back. You can’t take it all in at once. There’s too much contradiction and, in some cases, tumult to be perfectly coherent. Instead, you revisit the text, bringing new context to it each time you wander in and out of its world. Corners change shape and size with age and hindsight, but that’s alright. For many 90s kids, this record informed how they processed heartbreak, rage, longing, and loneliness. Maybe it helped raise them in broader, bolder strokes than that. The more I dug around in Reddit threads and comment sections, the bigger this album’s influence and impact became. Though it’s sold well over 10 million copies to date and earned the band seven Grammy nods, is it somehow underrated, especially against all the cultural baggage grunge has accumulated over time, like dog-eared photos destined for scrapbooks?

30 years later, that sounds more accurate than ever. Emo bands, prog revivalists, and bedroom-pop dreamers still borrow and seek solace in its drama and beauty, all excessive-sounding by design. It proved that alternative rock could be both orchestral and thrashy, intimate and grotesque. Corgan clearly wanted to make the defining album of his generation. Your mileage will vary when it comes to the answer to that question, but one fact is certain: the Smashing Pumpkins never again made a record this sprawling, unified, or utterly enthralling. It’s imperfect, which is precisely why it hits us as so human.

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What’s your favorite cut from this infinite sadness? Let’s compare notes.