Album Anniversaries: The Earnest Grandiosity Of ‘Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness’

25 years ago, Smashing Pumpkins released their third album, a sprawling exploration of the human condition and a high-water mark for the band.  

In Album Anniversaries, writers honor their favorite aging albums and their subsequent legacies, revealing which projects have stood the test of time.

Written by Carys Anderson 

Photo courtesy of Sporacle

When the world is a vampire, sincerity is a rare form of currency. 

By the time Smashing Pumpkins released their third album on Oct. 24, 1995, Billy Corgan was a rockstar, but that didn’t make him cool. In a landscape of punk-rock purity — raw production, aloof personas, ambiguous lyrics set to three-chord beatdowns — the head Pumpkin favored slick craftsmanship, whiny vocals, and confessional eight-minute breakdowns. His music was popular, but he didn’t fit in. As Kim Gordon, Sonic Youth bassist and poster child for underground coolness, put it in her 2015 memoir, Corgan was “such a crybaby, and Smashing Pumpkins took themselves way too seriously and were in no way punk rock.” 

Naturally, then, the self-indulgent Pumpkins called their third release Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness. A double album billed as Generation X’s own The Wall, the record opts for sweeping melodrama and earnest vulnerability against all mainstream notions of rock swagger. 

Maybe not the cool move, but certainly a smart one: with Corgan’s songwriting prowess on full display, the mammoth album somehow avoids bloat by overturning a new sonic leaf at every corner, its pure beauty replacing abrasive scarcity. Without a true concept, Mellon Collie’s two albums don’t attempt to tell a story so much as encapsulate the entirety of the human condition. Its tracks, then, capture every emotion burning at its brightest intensity. 

Sweeping strings begin the album on a note of grandiosity, from the swell of the opening instrumental title track to the opulence of its followup, “Tonight, Tonight.” “We’ll crucify the insincere tonight,” Corgan sings in the second track, tipping his hand right away. This is a record of hyperbole: everything is either fantastical or abysmal, and the stakes are always high. “The impossible is possible tonight,” he promises, Jimmy Chamberlin’s drums at a gallop. Yet, minutes later, in the barrelling “Jellybelly,” Corgan sneers, “Living makes me sick / So sick I wish I’d die.” 

This darkness follows him to “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” and “Zero,” alternative era staples that infuse his misery with glam. Hollow drums thump across uneasy lead single “Bullet,” where Corgan rages against conformity before resigning, “And I still believe that I cannot be saved.” Meanwhile, metallic guitar squall drives “Zero,” its hypnotically lopsided riff epitomizing Corgan’s brand of doom-and-gloom. With an era-defining t-shirt to match, “Zero” soon became synonymous with Corgan himself, not as a song, but as a hopeless character — one so ubiquitous that it would feature on The Simpsons. Corgan’s new look was only further proof that his musical career was not a haphazard burst of expression, but a meticulously crafted aesthetic.

Image courtesy of Virgin Records

Elsewhere, album deep cuts offer the same catharsis as these rock radio mainstays but spare the unfortunate lyricism that haunts the singles today (“Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage” did not age well). Sizzling synths engulf “Love”; “Where Boys Fear To Tread” plugs away at an insistent guitar growl; “Bodies” borders on metal. Razor-sharp six-string punches leap from the underlying drone of “X.Y.U.,” the Pumpkins’ most satisfying foray into heavy rock. “I was lonely and she was crazy,” Corgan repeats, his narrator explaining away a toxic relationship. The song jumps from chaos to slow sludge and back again, Corgan’s throat-tearing roar and guitarist James Iha’s screeching sirens leading the charge. 

Corgan screams his discontent in these rockers, but he also deals in quiet despair. He laments his lonely childhood in mournful elegy “To Forgive” and highlights teen angst in the solemn “Stumbleine.” “And nobody nowhere understands anything / About me / And all my dreams,” he sings in the latter, backed only by a finger-picked guitar. Despite his usual teenager-like melodrama, Corgan offers advice in “Stumbleine” that places him as the wise adult in his song: “And what they never knew / Can never get to you / So fake it.” In his unmistakable falsetto, Corgan’s sweetly sorrowful melody is somehow comforting. 

The warmth of Corgan’s compositions has a tendency to mask their heartbreak. “Will you leave me too?” he asks his estranged wife, his interrogation swaddled in soaring strings and building bass. “I’ll always need her more than she could ever need me,” he sighs in “In The Arms Of Sleep,” yet this earth-shattering realization is no match for the tender churning of its soundtrack. In these pretty moments, Corgan reveals the breadth of his songwriting talents.

Even when he’s being ridiculous, the artist manages to pull off his indulgence; the melodies are simply inarguable. The lovey affirmations of “Beautiful” seem overly simplistic — “as beautiful as the sun, as beautiful as the sky” — but with light piano and suction-cupped drums, the boy-girl duet of Corgan and bassist D’Arcy Wretzky’s harmonies go from nursery rhyme to slinking psychedelia. The narrator of “Lily (My One And Only)” is stalking the titular character, but the song’s bouncy polka beat makes it, too, a singalong. Quirky chimes of zither punctuate “We Only Come Out At Night,” which Corgan only wrote to prove that his recent purchase of the medieval instrument was not in vain. Even still, this random addition has prevailed as a jaunty goth kid’s anthem — and the soundtrack to an Apple commercial. 

From track to track and within the songs themselves, the magic of Mellon Collie lies in its scope. Over nine minutes, “Porcelina Of The Vast Oceans” cycles between a meandering guitar line and a monumental, climbing riff. “Thru The Eyes Of Ruby” is more urgent from the get-go, a triumphant piano quickly giving way to hazy atmospherics. “Breathing underwater,” Corgan sings, before sliding down the neck, slipping into the sea himself. Wretzky’s subterranean bass slides. In the grand finale, he slides upward into a final chorus; light beams shoot up from the ocean.

And, of course, between a lullaby and a grating exorcism lies “1979,” Mellon Collie’s second single and perhaps Corgan’s most unimpeachable work. The entire album dances around misspent youth — faking up a rampage, shaking out the loose teeth. But while the artist often wallows in the worst of teenage anguish, here, to a bubbling drum loop and a shimmering sample, Corgan looks back and smiles. “And we don’t even care / As restless as we are,” he sings, for once at peace. A dreamy soundtrack for a dreamy slice of life. 

Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness is an exhausting listen. It runs for over two hours, and in true youthful fashion, it demands to be felt wholly and deeply. Yet, when the rollercoaster ends, you feel spent, but complete. Accounted for. It’s like Corgan’s vow in the rumbling “An Ode To No One”: “Destroy the mind / Destroy the body / But you cannot destroy the heart.”  

It’s exciting to be stiff-lipped and underground, but it’s magical to be understood. Mellon Collie’s mania seems incoherent on paper, but it gels on record, its scratching stop-starts and lush soundscapes combining to assure you that it’s okay to feel everything. This is the stuff of stadiums, not clubs, and with over 5 million copies sold 25 years later, it’s clear Corgan’s sobs struck a nerve.