NAMM 2026: Back in September 2025, Billy Corgan made headlines when he joined My Chemical Romance onstage to perform Smashing Pumpkins classic Bullet With Butterfly Wings. But the alt-rock icon wasn’t plugging into his usual multi-tube amp rig. He was playing through a $629 pedal amp, the Laney Black Country Customs Supergrace.
“With My Chem, they’re all playing modelers, and they sound great. Having a full rig was complicated. I think that extols the virtue of the pedal,” Corgan tells Guitar World.
Announced today, the Supergrace came from a conversation between Corgan and James Laney and a request for a product that could “give the average guitar player the chance to own my live rig. My tone. The tone worth $100,000s”.
Laney collaborated with Chicago amp designer Brian Carstens, who makes the Grace heads that form the core of Corgan’s high-gain live rig, alongside a Laney Supergroup reissue that provides cleaner sounds.
The Supergroup channel, meanwhile, captures the grit that Tony Iommi used to invent heavy metal with Black Sabbath, but also offers cleaner textures for overdrive pedals via the Dimed/Clean switch. Laney’s ‘Transformer Rub’ sub-note is also present when you dime the gain.
As Corgan tells it, the aim was to update the Supergroup for a new generation of players.
“It shows you what's great about Laney and what’s great about a high-grade gain amp, like the amp that Brian and I did together,” Corgan tells Guitar World. “That's where it gets tricky: how do you bring that classic Laney sound into a tonality that works with a very high-gain, 21st century amp? And that becomes the existential thing that we tried to solve within the pedal.”
The pedal itself is all-analog solid state – in a painstaking process, Laney mapped the topology of both original amps and tuned them to respond like tubes – but it also features a digital IR section, and ships with Corgan’s preferred IRs.
Laney has also equipped the pedal with a Boost based on the Black Country Customs Steelpark circuit, as well as a digital spring reverb. Both are footswitchable. Bass, Middle and Treble controls are shared across the two channels, while an overall Tone control makes for quick tweaks.
There’s also XLR out and USB-C connectivity for recording with DAWs, MIDI integration for pedalboard switchers, and a transformer-isolated effects loop. Auxiliary inputs and headphone outputs make the Supergrace a valuable practice tool, too.
And, of course, it can drive a cab with 60W output (the pedal comes with its own laptop-style 24V 2.5A 60W DC power supply).
This is bringing the Laney Supergroup blueprint into the 21st century
Laney lightning first struck Corgan when a Smashing Pumpkins tech sold him a vintage Supergroup. That powered Smashing Pumpkins’ 2014 record Monuments to an Elegy, and has cropped up on every record that followed. A modern reissue has since become an essential part of his live rig alongside three Carstens heads – all of which led to the Supergrace.
“I think we now have enough empirical evidence to suggest that the genius of the Laney design and the genius of the Marshall design set the template for all hard rock that followed,” Corgan says.
“I don’t think Mr. Marshall and Mr. Laney could even imagine where guitar players were going to take that. But whatever they figured out is still very valuable. This is bringing that blueprint into the 21st century.”
The Supergrace is available now for $629/£449/€529. Head to Laney for more information.
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