The Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan: "I’m a firm believer that the distortion signatures of a guitar need to be organic"

Smashing Pumpkins
(Image credit: Jonathan Weiner)

In an age of fractured attention spans and a ghastly over-reliance on nostalgia porn, The Smashing Pumpkins dare to be defiant with their unapologetically erratic and experimental new album: the 72-minute long, synthpop-inspired Cyr. Its 20 tracks are bold and brooding and just the right tinge of buoyant – simplistic at first glance but structured like the perfect French pastry with layer upon layer of deep and dense artistic flair when you dig just a little deeper. Fans of the Pumpkins’ ripping and raging grunge-rock anthems will almost certainly turn their noses up at Cyr – but Billy Corgan doesn’t give a shit. 

When we caught up with the 53-year-old father, musical multi-hyphenate and pro wrestling obsessive, one thing became immediately clear: though he’s still emphatically outspoken, Corgan’s appetite to reign at the top of the rock ’n’ roll food chain has all but fizzled out entirely. He notes that he couldn’t be happier with where he’s at on his creative timeline, and even if the critics at large and his army of obsessives hate Cyr with a passion, he’ll still hold the double-disc epic close to his heart. 

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Ellie Robinson
Editor-at-Large, Australian Guitar Magazine

Ellie Robinson is an Australian writer, editor and dog enthusiast with a keen ear for pop-rock and a keen tongue for actual Pop Rocks. Her bylines include music rag staples like NME, BLUNT, Mixdown and, of course, Australian Guitar (where she also serves as Editor-at-Large), but also less expected fare like TV Soap and Snowboarding Australia. Her go-to guitar is a Fender Player Tele, which, controversially, she only picked up after she'd joined the team at Australian Guitar. Before then, Ellie was a keyboardist – thankfully, the AG crew helped her see the light…