The Smashing Pumpkins – Atum (4LP/Insert)

The Smashing Pumpkins twelfth studio album; a three-act rock opera album titled ATUM (pronounced Autumn). ATUM will feature 33-tracks, and is the sequel to 1995’s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and 2000’s Machina/Machine of God. ATUM was written and produced by Billy Corgan over the past 4 years.

ATUM is a rock opera presented in three acts by inimitable American rock band The Smashing Pumpkins. The album tells an epic interplanetary story set in the not-too-distant future, though the songs themselves respectively stand on their own in the Pumpkins pantheon. This is the final installment in a concept album trilogy, which began with 1995’s Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness and then continued with 2000’s Machina/The Machines of God.

The album features three original members of the band-William Corgan, James Iha, and Jimmy Chamberlin-as well as longtime guitarist Jeff Schroeder. Corgan had been developing the idea for the rock opera for years, and the pandemic gave him the time off the road to meticulously complete it in the grandiose way he had intended. When The Smashing Pumpkins first emerged out of Chicago in 1988, the world had never heard a band quite like them. They spun together rock, pop, shoe-gaze, metal, goth, psychedelia, and electronic into a kaleidoscope of saccharine melodies, fuzzy distortion, bombastic orchestration, incendiary fretwork, eloquent songcraft, and unshakable hooks.