The Smashing Pumpkins announce new “rock opera” album ‘ATUM’
American alt-rockers The Smashing Pumpkins have announced that their new album ATUM (pronounced “autumn”) will be a 33-track long “rock opera”. Acting as the band’s 12th studio album, ATUM will be released over the course of seven months.
Each ‘act’ of the album will contain 11 tracks, which will be drip-fed to fans, beginning on November 15th. Act Two is set to be released on January 31st 2023, and Act Three on April 21st.
Once all acts have been released, the band will drop a special edition box set of the album, limited to just 1,333 copies. The album will contain ten discs, which include the album, a spoken word retelling of the first act narrated by Bill Kurtis, and five discs of unreleased material.
Lead singer Billy Corgan has been teasing the album for quite some time, even before the release of their most recent album, CYR. He hinted that the epic three-part album will be a sequel to their third album, 1995’s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, and 2000’s duo of Machina albums.
He said the album is “set about 20 years in the future. It’s basically the story of a character through three different iterations. In ’95 it was ‘Zero’; 2000 it was ‘Glass’; and this character’s called ‘Shiny’. It’s sort of a psychological metamorphosis of a character over a long period of time. So the character is far older at the beginning of the musical.”
To tease the album, The Smashing Pumpkins released the first track from ATUM, ‘Beguiled’. The song sees the band return to their classic heavy guitar-driven sound, contrasting their experiments with synth-pop on their previous record.
The band are also going to be playing a free intimate gig in New York City on September 22nd, where they will debut some of the album’s new tracks.
ATUM will be accompanied by a podcast named Thirty-Three With William Patrick Corgan, co-produced by iHeartRadio, which explores each track from the “rock opera” in detail. The first two episodes have already been released, which you can listen to here.
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