10 Hyped Hard Rock Albums That Weren't Worth The Wait

Like Furbies, Tamagotchis and duck-shaped hairdryers, The Smashing Pumpkins were a staple of the 1990s. Billy Corgan's world was a vampire, and so was his sound, built around a pairing of guitar-driven, sharp-edged grunge rock with what today's up and comers might call sadcore vocals and melodies.

After several turbulent years, the Pumpkins disbanded with a farewell gig in 2000, and that seemed to be the end of it, with everyone moving on to different projects. That was until 2005 when Corgan and original drummer Jimmy Chamberlin built the band back up from the ashes, and spent the next two years whipping fans into a frenzy for their next release: Zeitgeist.

But the wait wasn't worth it. The material was weak, the album floundered and critics generally agreed that, while it wasn't the worst thing in the world, nothing about it was inspirational, memorable or worth the price of taking the record home.

What hurt them most was not that the album was so awful, but that music had moved on since the band were last recording (the album's predecessor, Machina II/The Friends & Enemies Of Modern Music, was written in 1999); fellow bands like Nirvana and Sonic Youth were no longer in the charts and the Pumpkins' distinctively '90s sound was simply no longer as relevant as it used to be.