ON THE RISE
It was the beginning of 1996 when an up and coming alternative group called the Smashing Pumpkins set out on a global run in support of their latest release, “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.” One of the earliest dates brought them to Los Angeles for a packed performance at the legendary Palace Theatre, where fans filled the venue wall to wall. Instead of opening with the loud, abrasive energy that dominated alternative rock the year before, the band surprised everyone by beginning with a quiet piano performance.
The song was the album’s title track, a deeply reflective piece filled with emotion, optimism and the feeling of stepping into a new chapter. Billy Corgan, who was 28 at the time, wrote it while teaching himself how to play piano.
Corgan recalls the moment feeling almost unreal, surrounded by the Palace Theatre’s velvet drapes, the gentle melody and the overwhelming excitement from the crowd. Then everything erupted as pounding drums and roaring guitars crashed into the room, fully introducing the massive soundscape of “Mellon Collie.”
Three decades later, “Mellon Collie” is widely viewed as one of the defining rock records of the 1990s, later inspiring artists such as Muse, My Chemical Romance and Silversun Pickups. The album marked a dramatic turning point for the band, who had previously become known for the dreamy, progressive leaning sound of their 1993 breakthrough “Siamese Dream.” Unlike that record, “Mellon Collie” arrived as an ambitious concept double album, with lyrics tracing a journey that Corgan described as “one day that can represent your entire life.”
Throughout that concept, the record shifts through crushing and emotional examinations of rage and identity on tracks like “Muzzle,” “Zero” and “Bullet With Butterfly Wings,” nostalgic and delicate moments in “Cupid De Locke” and “Thirty-Three,” and themes of youth and romance in “1979” and “Love.” Its enormous range in both storytelling and musical direction made it stand apart from other rock albums of its era, abandoning the detached attitude often associated with grunge in favor of sincerity, emotion and experimentation.
Taking cues from Pink Floyd’s “The Wall,” the noisy textures of Sonic Youth, the symbolic songwriting and layered arrangements of Black Sabbath, along with surreal visual art influences, “Mellon Collie” pushed the Smashing Pumpkins further than ever before. The album challenged the group to discover how far they could stretch creatively and how completely they could capture human emotion within a single project.
To celebrate the album’s 30th anniversary, the band has partnered with the Lyric Opera of Chicago, their hometown orchestra, to reinterpret “Mellon Collie” as an opera production. They are also releasing the album again alongside previously unheard recordings from the 1996 “Infinite Sadness” tour. Featuring performances from Los Angeles to Philadelphia, the recordings preserve the intensity of the live shows and document a defining chapter in the band’s story.
In “Tonight, Tonight,” Corgan reflects, “And our lives are forever changed, we will never be the same.”
Looking back at the legacy of “Mellon Collie,” those lyrics feel hauntingly accurate. “Nothing was quite the same after this album,” Corgan told the Times. In many ways, that statement could not be more true.
The album earned seven Grammy nominations and launched the band into another level of fame through massive MTV exposure and a series of enduring hit singles. Away from the spotlight, however, Corgan was struggling through the collapse of his first marriage. During the tour, growing tensions inside the group eventually exploded following the overdose death of touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin. Later that same year, Corgan also lost his mother.
What followed “Mellon Collie” and the turbulent 1996 tour was a period filled with instability and upheaval. Yet within the life of the album itself existed a rare moment where Corgan and the Smashing Pumpkins came together in complete creative harmony to make a record that would ultimately shape their careers and, in many ways, the course of their lives.
Something I really love, especially about the piano and “Tonight, Tonight” as the opening track, is this feeling of hope that it starts off with, or maybe that’s just what I got from it.
[Laughs] It starts with hope and ends somewhere else, let’s put it that way.
What was the intention with starting with this feeling and what was it inspired by at the time?
I was going through a lot in my personal life, and I was grappling with the changes in my life and the awareness that I had in my life, given what I’d been through as a child and now as an adult with success, it was like I was trying to grapple with all that and wondering what really matters.
I think if you look at the general narrative of the album, it starts with the idea and it starts with the dream and what is possible within the dream. So, for example, you pointed to the piano piece that opens the record.
I went to a store, not too far from where I’m sitting and talking to you [he was calling from his car in Chicago], and bought an old 1920s piano with mismatched legs for $2,500. Now that may not seem like a big deal, but at 27 years old, when I was writing the record, I never owned a piano nor was I allowed to play a piano in my relatives’ houses.
So I finally had this moment of, wow, I can actually buy a piano and I can play my own piano in my own house. As silly as that sounds, it had never crossed my mind that way. I’d always lived in apartments and I was always on the road. It was like a new beginning. It starts with the gift that I gave myself and that ends up having a lot of influence on the compositional structure of the record.
And then “Tonight, Tonight,” was a song that we messed around with for about four months. And one night it just came to me in a flash, like what the song needed to sound like, and I went upstairs to this room that I had in my house and I just remember playing it like I could hear the whole orchestra in my head and I thought, OK, that’s what I need to do.
Something I see on this new reissue is that there’s going to be a lot of recordings from that live 1996 tour right after the release of the album. What was it like relistening to these performances, especially as it was the last tour with the band’s full original lineup?
We had crested a particular wave at the time. We had a No. 1 album. We were playing, I think, a 90-date arena tour, which, now there’s a ton of artists playing stadiums, but back then an arena show was essentially the top of the mountain. So then we had success, we had fame, we had money that we’d never had.
With that, we had all the trappings. And I think in the recordings that are on this record that’s coming out, it’s like a light burning bright before it burns out. If you’ve ever had that experience, you’re in a room and all of a sudden the lightbulb gets really intense and then it burns out. So, you hear us basically burning out.
And there’s a sort of incandescent poetic beauty to all that, and there’s just the sorrow to it because you also realize it’s the last of that moment. In many ways, it was truly the end of that band. I mean, yes, the band has continued, and James [Iha] and Jimmy [Chamberlin] and I have been playing back together again for seven years, and released more records and had a tremendous amount of success of late.
But you can never recapture the innocence of youth or the innocence of the time. When you combine those types of experiences with loss and sorrow and the knowledge of what didn’t happen or what could have happened, then it makes revisiting this time bittersweet.
What do you think “Mellon Collie” means today and how has it been for you to see younger generations continue to be inspired by it?
I view that album in particular very much within the realm of a child who grows up in a latchkey situation. It’s very much a Gen X term. Latchkey kids were those whose parents were working a lot or not home, so they grew up by and large unsupervised. So what does a kid who grows up unsupervised do? They watched a lot of television, and then we consumed a lot of sugar and got up to a lot of delinquent-type things.
So I think the album is very representative of that experience and I think why it continues to resonate for subsequent generations is, it’s very dissociative. Back in the ’90s, the mainstream culture, including the L.A. Times and the New York Times, they really struggled with, “Where’s this all coming from?” Now you are living in a world that is constantly dissociative thanks to social media.
The thing that’s surprising, I’m basing it on personal conversations I’ve had with tons of musicians through the years, is that our album gave some musicians the permission to pursue a wider artistic vision. Because “Mellon Collie” is so wide. It has so much breadth. So what I’ve heard from other artists is, “Wow, when I heard that album, I thought, I can do this too, but in my own way.” And that to me is like, that’s a penultimate compliment from another musician. It’s really humbling.
The greatest thrill now is seeing that young people really do connect with the record. And they connect with songs that are different from the previous generations, which is even cooler. They seem to like the weirder stuff on it rather than the ... let’s call it, the classic rock alternative stuff.
That’s a cool way of looking at it. Like the previous generation probably was really obsessed with “Bullet With Butterfly Wings,” and maybe newer listeners aren’t as focused on that song specifically. In that song, it’s interesting that you say, “Can you fake it for just one more show?” Or this feeling of putting on a performance and feeling that you have to fake it as an artist. Is that something that still resonates with you?
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Because you work so hard to be on that stage and then, as Roger Waters so aptly describes in “The Wall,” you find yourself having a surrealist experience on that same stage. You put yourself through hell to get there and then one day you’re standing there and you’re like, what am I doing here?
I’ve had similar moments where I’m standing on stage and you feel like you’re tripping on drugs, but you’re totally sober. Because the thing that you love inverts on you. When I was a kid, I thought being on TV was a peak thing. But then I was there, about to perform on TV, and there were all these things going on, like you’re tired, or you’re being sued or your bandmate doesn’t like the deli tray. And I just thought, what am I doing here? I felt like I was living in “Spinal Tap.” This is supposed to be fun. This is supposed to be glamorous. This is supposed to be a thousand other things that you put on the rock-star checklist and you find yourself saying, I don’t want to be here.
If you turn to your friends or your family and say, “I’m really struggling with how I’m supposed to process the information that I’m receiving up here,” you’re told you’re ungrateful or you’re out of your mind or you really need to check your ego. I reached a point where it was like, no, I don’t have the skill set to survive punishing my mind, body, spirit five to six nights a week in front of strangers singing songs that are very personal to me and I hear the cheering and I see the flash bulbs popping, but I’m so numb that I can’t feel what’s happening. So in a lot of ways, that song and the themes from the album are still real.
You’ve said in the “Mellon Collie” sessions, you guys were working on 50 songs at once, that you’re working for six hours a day, just really intense in the studio. What are your thoughts as you think back to that? Were there any memories that really arise for you?
Despite our public persona of being dysfunctional and brawling, we were quite quiet in the rehearsal space. We almost never had guests and 97% of the time, it was just the four of us in a room working.
So, the real memory for me is just day after day after day of trying tons and tons of different ideas, and it started to wind itself into a story through those 60-plus songs, many of which came out in those few years. It was our best period of musical alignment and I think you can hear that. We worked very hard and very peacefully together for eight months to put all that together.
We had just come off a tour, “Siamese Dream,” which was a 14-month tour, and we went in the studio for eight months, made the “Mellon Collie” record, and we immediately went back on tour. And that tour was 22 months long. So when you ask my memory from that time, it’s like, can you describe the blur? It was a really beautiful blur, you know?
You said something really interesting earlier about “Tonight, Tonight” coming to you with the sound of an orchestra. Talk about what it was like to see that song and this album come to life as an opera with Chicago Lyric.
The idea that I would even not only write something on the piano, and now, a full orchestra is playing that song here in Chicago with the lyrics I wrote ... is totally mind-blowing. The first time I heard it with an orchestra, I started to cry, because I thought, this is so crazy. This song that I used to teach myself how to play the piano was now being played by some of the greatest musicians in the world in this beautiful opera hall. I can’t explain to you the strangeness of that journey.
I was made fun of [for using classical instruments in ’90s rock music]. It was seen as too precocious or too artsy or too, I don’t know, overly grand. And now, if you look at alternative music, I mean, there’s been an absolute explosion of people using unconventional instrumentation within the breath of alternative music, as it should be. So it makes me laugh now that there was a time where somehow that was pseudo-controversial.
Coming to my last question for you, how did this album impact your life 30 years later and impact your artistry?
After putting out something like this, artistically it was a triumph. But then publicly it became surreal. We hit a level where people were following you through malls and we were on MTV. It’s not like we had not tasted success, but this was this other stratospheric aspect of success. And something about that album just kind of blew everything wide open.
Family relationships, personal relationships, business relationships, everything just kind of went sideways. I remember thinking nothing was quite the same after that album. Which is true, but it’s not true the way you think it is.
The album has never left my life and is never far away from the conversation. It was never like I put it down and left it behind. Other people won’t let me forget and that’s a good thing because the value holds, and I’ll never forget about it.
Based in London, vocalist and DJ iKeda already appears to be following the path of a major pop act, although she is hesitant to accept that description. “These days, it’s just too easy to call someone a pop star,” she tells NME during a conversation in the sunshine at a Hackney pub garden. With her newest EP ‘Bangs N Braces’ almost here, she insists that such recognition should be deserved. “You really need to earn your stripes to have that label. Someone like PinkPantheress or Addison Rae, they’re building a whole image and world – those are true pop stars.”
Although she has yet to reach the same heights as those artists, her career is clearly gaining momentum. Since 2024, she has released songs combining the irresistible energy of UK funky, electroclash and dancehall, while becoming a familiar face across the London underground electropop scene. One of her biggest opportunities arrived earlier this year when she was invited to open for PinkPantheress during the celebrated ‘Fancy That’ tour, an experience she describes as “almost like a dream”.
“I just couldn’t believe I was playing venues that size at this point in my career,” she recalls. Instead of allowing those initial worries to overwhelm her, she transformed them into “super healing positive energy” and committed herself to delivering the strongest performances possible. “I told myself that I was asked to do this for a reason, that I need to take the audience reception as actual constructive criticism and not crash out. It was too amazing an opportunity not to go one hundred per cent full throttle.”
With a tequila soda in hand, iKeda discusses a musical palette shaped by everyone from Santigold to SOPHIE. However, much of her creativity is fuelled by the trusted circle of friends and artists around her. Fellow club scene regular Babymorocco encouraged her to try songwriting in 2024, leading to her debut single ‘Luv Drunk’: “It was such a far-away concept, going into the studio and writing, but he started doing it, and I saw how quickly he got good.”
Her childhood was divided between Tottenham’s “concrete jungle” and life aboard a houseboat in the peaceful surroundings of Cambridge, giving iKeda an early instinct for creating stories. During her teenage years, she tried her hand at short fiction before studying visual art at Central Saint Martins. “It’s so powerful when you can take something into your own hands and write these things which you wish could happen in real life,” she says while discussing why visuals remain so essential to her creative identity. “I love just being in a world when I’m listening to music.”
That sense of entering another reality sits at the heart of ‘Bangs N Braces’, her forthcoming second EP. The project steps away from the Y2K dance pop character of her 2024 debut, ‘Pretty Little Problem’, and moves deeper into dancehall and funky house. It also serves as her personal declaration of the “gyal dem” lifestyle. In iKeda’s eyes, the meaning of being a “gyal” is not limited by gender or sexuality: “It’s all about one goal, moving toward complete liberation. It’s about maximising disruption, taking up space regardless of if someone has a problem with it.”
That fearless attitude has helped her explore sounds she previously felt nervous about approaching. “Jamaicans can be very perfectionistic about their dancehall, so I’ve always been a little bit intimidated,” she admits before explaining how the music honours her Windrush heritage. “I’ve always wanted to make this kind of music, and I’m finally at the place where I’m confident in exploring that.”
The result is a sound iKeda has named “bubblegum riddim”, blending electronic club pop with dancehall rhythms. “I feel an obsession with music that’s very effervescent and bubbly – it’s like your head is fizzing.” Beneath that sugary surface, however, lies something much rougher. “A lot of pop music is meant to sound quite tuned,” she says. “But with bubblegum riddim, there’s an edge. I love how in a lot of ’90s dancehall, the female vocals are a little off-key, almost fighting the beat.”
“I want to put on an actual production. I want to make bodies of work with coherent eras”
Across ‘Bangs N Braces’, this refreshed creative perspective moves between the grime coloured intensity of ‘Red Red’ and the bright dancehall energy of ‘Go!’ and ‘Meoww’. ‘Tiger Tiger’ captures both iKeda’s vivid imagination and growing confidence. “I was going down memory lane with old childhood books, and I saw The Tiger Who Came To Tea. The story morphed into this whole thing, like there’s this secret club and you can only go if you’re a bad girl.” Alongside surreal visions of mysterious potions and twisting white rabbits, the song reflects a broader personal transformation: “It’s part of my new path of just completely feeling myself.”
With the EP arriving later this month, iKeda says her newfound confidence has brought a welcome sense of freedom that is now influencing how she writes. “I just want to make feel-good music because that’s how I’m feeling right now,” she says. Even though her songs capture the carefree thrill of club pop, she treats simple melodies with genuine seriousness. “People don’t understand how hard it is to write a catchy hook without it turning into slop,” she explains. Her perfectionist nature keeps her focused on every small element, including “the little intros and interludes, which labels don’t care about but that listeners love”.
Although she is not ready to describe herself as a pop star, her ambitions suggest she already possesses the imagination and determination required to become one. “I just want to improve everything. I want to put on an actual production. I want to make bodies of work with coherent eras,” she says when asked about her future, revealing the constant drive behind her creativity. “Right now I’m trusting more in my ideas. I’m eternally grateful for all of the good times I’ve had, but I definitely have more to say.”
iKeda’s ‘Bangs N Braces’ EP arrives August 28 through Orbit Artist Group.
