If The Smashing Pumpkins’ last album, the sprawling, 20-track Cyr, felt a little lightweight, then don't worry. Billy Corgan has started work on the follow-up - and it will feature an almighty 33 songs.
Corgan originally promised/threatened the album last October, pitching it as a sequel to the band’s 1995 double album Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness and its equally weighty 2000 follow-up Machina/Machines Of God.
The frontman described the untitled album as “kind of a rock opera”, adding: “We feel like in many ways this completes the circle on everything we started and weren’t able to finish at that time, so we’re very excited about [it]”.
Now Corgan and co have officially begun work on this behemoth. The band took to social media to post a blurred picture of a miked-up drum kit, with the caption: “Starting new SP album today, the 33 song sequel to MCIS and Machina. Songs are written, lyrics too...so now it's just record-record-record.”
If that wasn’t enough, Corgan also confirmed that the band were putting the finishing touches to a reworked version of their sixth album, Machina II/The Friends & Enemies Of Modern Music, which was originally released on the internet for free in 2000. And the new version could potentially feature a frankly indigestible 80 tracks.
Says Corgan of the latter, “It was written to be kind of like a musical, but because it was never finished, it was like shooting a movie that wasn’t fully edited right”
“’Machina I’ was like one edit of the footage, and Machina II was some of the leftover footage – but there was even more stuff leftover. So, this was my attempt, 20 years later, to kind of finish the movie and in the process of trying to finish the movie, realising the movie can never be finished because a lot of stuff wasn’t finished.”
