Smashing Pumpkins complete new album ‘Monuments to an Elegy’

Billy Corgan has explored some unexpected paths in recent years. He’s opened a tea house in a Chicago suburb, founded a professional wrestling league and performed an eight-hour musical interpretation of Herman Hesse’s existentialist classic “Siddhartha.”

The Smashing Pumpkins leader recently explored a more familiar avenue, announcing that he has completed “Monuments to an Elegy,” one of two records the band says are lined up.

“I’d like to boast and say it’s some newly invented form, but more than likely it’s just a stripped compendium, that in its steeliness achieves some eager, brute modernity,” Corgan wrote on the Smashing Pumpkins site, the Panopticon.

Corgan believes the completed record “was one of the easiest and most pleasurable albums I’ve ever made.” He was more vague in delivering word of a released date, adding, “if we’re lucky it’ll be out soon enough.” No details have been released regarding the second planned record, “Day for Night.”

Corgan also revealed the completed album’s tracklist, which is, as the Pumpkins have been, “subject to changes and changes.”

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