Smashing Pumpkins: 11 Essential Tracks All Fans Should Listen To
30 years of music; 30 years of incredible songs.
The 90s saw an array of changes playing in the airwaves, from college rock breaking into the mainstream to genres once considered underground melding into the public zeitgeist.
One of the bands to emerge from the scene was Smashing Pumpkins. They honed the perfect amalgamation of genres from shoegaze to sludge metal, psychedelic rock, progressive rock, and punk music siphoned into expressionistic melancholic anthems. Even when they shifted gears into an industrial goth-rock group, the band's sound was unmistakable.
With a career spanning 30 years and 10 studio albums, Smashing Pumpkins have a huge catalogue of music under their belts with some songs that encapsulate the virtuosity and power of the group. While more known greats such as 1979, Bullet With Butterfly Wings, or Tonight Tonight are timeless, for the sake of giving the limelight to other heavyweight songs, these will be excluded since the singles alone can make up the list.
These 11 songs epitomize the Smashing Pumpkins' style and are what any Pumpkins fan should listen to.
11. For Martha
The tonal shift and transition from Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness to Ava Adore is, to say the least, incredibly jarring. Departing from the band's sludge metal progressive rock-oriented songs, the band switched to focus on more introspective songs playing within genres like industrial, goth rock, and electronic.
On first listen, it's almost another band entirely, but Ava Adore undeniably holds a spiritual likeness to their previous work.
The gothic romanticism in Martha is everything that made Smashing Pumpkins a great band. It's a heart-wrenching song full of vulnerability and humble in its delivery. Corgan's singing is a change of pace compared to other songs with his gentle whispering falsetto. Right when the song's emotional catharsis reaches its noise guitar solo, he subdues his flurry of emotions with nuance, abandoning an adolescent emotional outburst to mature articulation.
It's a stark departure from belting out heartbreak and pain, trading it for a much more tender approach as he mourns the loss of love. In doing so it makes the theme of lost love more impactful as it gently sways from his grasp, no longer his to hold but appreciate.
Ava Adore was different but had the same essence that made the band unique: always experimenting and pushing itself. Martha stands alongside their best body of work as a remarkably tragic song.