The Hidden Smashing Pumpkins Record:

The Hidden Pumpkins Record: Billy Corgan on Zodeon at Crystal Hall tracked down by Marc Burrows author of Nirvana: A Detailed Guide To The Band That Changed Everything (Signed book)

Did you know that Smashing Pumpkins put a new album out at the end of 2025? It’s a good one too. Zodeon at Crystal Hall is a collection of loose, sixties-influenced neo-psychedelic pop recorded during the pandemic and left in the vault while Billy Corgan and co concentrated on grander projects. Chances are you haven’t heard about it. And Corgan is fine with that. “I almost like the idea of, ‘okay, there it is‘. And eventually people will figure it out” he says, down the line from Chicago, “I’m not being coy about it. I’m just saying it’s okay that nobody pays attention to it. They’ll get around to it.”

It’s true that, from a media perspective at least, this one has flown under the radar, though that has a lot to do with the release model. There’s no press release, no videos, no singles, no media blitz, no advance reviews and no advertising. This is the first and so-far only interview Corgan has done to promote it. Zodeon is, for now, only available on vinyl and only on mail-order from Madame Zuzus, the tea-house Corgan owns with his wife, the artist and designer Chloe Mendel Corgan, from which the couple run a boutique record label. It’s entirely self-released and self-funded: a true, DIY indie release from a band that still sell-out arenas around the world. Billy Corgan, as usual, is refusing to stick to the play book.

And partly that’s because no-one knows what the play book even is anymore.

“I think we’re still in the process of redefining how to release music,” Corgan says, “and unconsciously we’ve sleepwalked from one old modality into the new modality. The old modality was the classic thing: build up the pressure, release the record, put out a single. That was the modality for 60 years. You have to unwind the propaganda in your brain, if you grew up in the old music business, and stop worrying about time. What does it matter how the record reaches people, if it reaches them eventually? So this is a different way of coming at it.”

Time is never time at all

We should probably rewind here. Zodeon at Crystal Hall began as a pandemic project with no real intention of being an “album” at all. In fact, initially it was just … something to do. “As soon as I heard the government going, ‘Oh, two weeks [of lock down] to stop the spread,’ I literally went in to where I work and I said, ‘There’s no way. This is going to go on forever‘” remembers Corgan.

“So I found myself attracted to the idea of just doing something fun, in an indulgent way, kind of like how we used to do our B-sides. Like, let’s do something quick, let’s try to record a song a day.”

There’s a precedent for this sort of thing. “Do you know the Dukes of Stratosphear 25 O’Clock record?” he asks. In 1985, XTC created a fake band to record a pastiche of mid-sixties British psychedelia. The album cover was designed to look like a forgotten artefact from 1967. As a teenager, Corgan bought it on the strength of the sleeve alone. “I had no idea that it was XTC. I had no idea it was a faux band. And I got it right away. I thought, ‘Well, whoever’s doing this is really skilled, because they’ve totally copped the early Pink Floyd vibe.’”

The idea stuck with him: a band playing another band. The Beatles did it with Sgt. Pepper. Green Day did it with the Foxboro Hottubs. Corgan himself has done it with the Pumpkins’ Machina mythology, a record built around an elaborate fictional construct. So when the world shut down and he found himself with nothing but time, he started wondering: what if the Pumpkins wrapped themselves “in the cloak of like ’65-’66 psych — less ‘Strawberry Fields’ psychedelic and more like earlier psych, like earlier Yardbirds and stuff like that.”

This meant stripping back. No walls of layered guitars. No “800 overdubs”. Instead, Corgan reached for older, more temperamental tools. “I have an original ’65 or ’66 Mellotron,” he says. “A real one that I had to have fixed.” It’s the same model — a Mark I converted to Mark II — that the Beatles used on ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. “Rather than get out the newer one, or the [one I used on] Siamese Dream, I got out the ’65 one, and it’s clunky and it makes noise.”

That clunkiness was the point. “I think it’s really important that, if you look at ’65 to ’67 psych, part of what makes it interesting is they were dealing with really primitive technology. Literally one guitar pedal would create the landscape they were after, and they only had four tracks. They wanted to make this different type of music, but they didn’t have 400 plugins and 800 guitar pedals. They had, like, one guitar pedal and one weird organ, and that was it.”

In keeping with this vibe Zodeon’s drums were recorded to a single mono channel. Jimmy Chamberlin, one of the most technically gifted rock drummers of his generation, would come in, do two takes, and that would be that. “That’s very much how we worked back in the day with the B-sides,” Corgan explains. “It was like, ‘we got four hours, let’s just knock it out’.”

You can hear all of this in the finished record. There’s an analogue warmth to Zodeon that feels genuinely vintage, not in the retro-fetishist way that plagues a lot of modern psych, but in a manner that suggests musicians actually enjoying themselves in a room together without worrying too much about perfection. “What I like is it’s a window into the band in a relaxed state,” Corgan says. By its nature, that means a much less commercial Smashing Pumpkins: “The Pumpkins in our natural state is not that attractive as a record-selling proposition or attention-seeking thing. It just isn’t. Our natural personalities are kind of hazy psych.”

The end is the beginning is the end

What Zodeon really reveals, according to Corgan, is the real Smashing Pumpkins — the band they might have been if circumstances hadn’t demanded otherwise.

“I’ve always said that the band that became the band wasn’t really the band’s personality,” he tells me. “The band’s personality is much closer to things like [1994 b-sides collection] Pisces Iscariot. It’s like if we’d been an indie band and didn’t have a lot of success, we probably would have stayed that band, but once we were put in the position where we had to have success or we were going to get wiped off the map, then it changed the personality.”

This is familiar territory for anyone who’s followed Corgan’s public commentary over the years. The narrative goes like this: in the early nineties, the Pumpkins found themselves signed to a major label following a debut album, Gish, pitched deliberately to be an underground success. That couldn’t be the case with its follow-up. The pressure was on. “You literally have a record company pointing, you know, a euphemistic gun at your head,” Corgan recalls. “If you don’t figure this out…back to Chicago you go.”

He figured it out. But figuring it out meant taking control, layering those guitars, chasing the hits, becoming the maximalist art-rock behemoth that conquered the world with Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. The hazy, loose, psych-inflected band that made the early demos and the B-sides, the band of ‘Rhinocerous’, ‘Starla’ and ‘Drown’, got buried under the weight of ambition and necessity.

Zodeon sits in a lineage with those other moments when Corgan let the mask slip: Pisces Iscariot. Machina II, the unpolished, self-released album given out to fans in 2000 with instructions to bootleg to their heart’s content. Teargarden by Kaleidyscope, the sprawling track-by-track project from the early 2010s that saw Corgan working with Electric Prunes’ bass player Mark Tulin. “That’s the hidden lineage of the band”, he says. “And actually it’s more revelatory of my personality and the band’s natural personality than what everybody thinks it is musically.”

Once upon a time

Since the mid-1990s, Billy Corgan has occasionally used Smashing Pumpkins records to tell a parallel, somewhat allegorical story about a central figure, known variously as “Zero”, “Glass” and, more recently, “Shiny”, a rock star who becomes famous, alienated, mythologised and, eventually, exiled. To space. It’s a loose, shifting narrative rather than a fixed plot, but one that has surfaced repeatedly across the band’s work, most explicitly on the Mellon Collie and Machina albums and, decades later, on 2023’s ATUM: A Rock Opera in Three Acts.

Zodeon at Crystal Hall sits slightly to one side of that arc, though not outside it. The songs were mostly written and recorded before Corgan had committed to ATUM, yet when he returned to the material, he realised it could be tweaked to slot naturally into the mythology. Some tracks even appeared in a special edition of ATUM itself, though since they were on mono 7”s and only available in a box set that cost £180, you’ll be forgiven if you missed them.

“Zodeon is the record that Shiny makes before he’s put off-planet,” Corgan explains. “He makes a sentimental record as he’s leaving, but it’s all in code. He makes a non-threatening record that he knows the media and the fans will ignore, and laces it with messages.”

Zodeon, then, is wistful, inward-looking, sometimes weary. It sounds like a farewell without announcing itself as one. On the closing tracks, ‘The Bard’ and the album’s gorgeous centrepiece ‘Story for Another Day’, that sense of quiet finality is unmistakable. “I have nothing left to prove,” Corgan sings on ‘Excelsior’, a line that feels less like a lyric than a thesis.

It’s not a huge leap to hear that resignation as something more than fiction. Corgan has always sung through characters, but beneath Shiny, Glass and Zero you will always find Billy Corgan, and beneath Billy, aging into acceptance, has always been William Patrick Corgan. The resignation here seems as much his as it is Shiny’s.

We don’t know just where our bones will rest

“I think I’ve reached a sort of deeper point of sorrow,” Corgan admits. Part of this, he says, was the pandemic itself — the isolation, the political division, the feeling of powerlessness. But it went further than that. “There’s many a movie made about the young warrior who’s got to go on the battlefield and prove his worth. Well, there’s a side story that gets less attention, which is: what do you do with the aging warrior? Does he retire from the battlefield, or does he keep swinging away with the sword that’s getting heavier and heavier as time goes on?”

This is Corgan at 58, looking backwards and forwards simultaneously. He’s clear-eyed about his legacy and about the ways his relationship with success has shaped his psychology. Ten million sales of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and elevation to the top tier of rock didn’t give him what he wanted. His band fell apart. His mother died. His first marriage crumbled. Artistic peaks aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. “You go through all that sacrifice and inner doubt and tumult,” he says “and then you come down off the mountain of the whole thing, and you go, ‘That didn’t really work for me.’ Well, it does something to your brain.”

The result was a kind of creative paranoia. A distrust of the process. And, famously, a willingness to pick fights with the media, with fans, with anyone who seemed to be hemming him into a version of himself he’d already outgrown. Corgan has spent years railing against what he calls the “Siamese zombies” — fans who refuse to engage with anything beyond the band’s early nineties peak.

But something shifted in the last seven years. “I think what you see is me giving up the idea that I belong,” he says. “I have my own family, I’m cool. We’re all good. Life is really good. So I think [the band’s] getting back to that punkish space of like, ‘I’m just going to do what I think works. And if you ignore it, or marginalise me, or sort of shrug your shoulders at it or don’t really care? It’s all good.’”

This acceptance — hard-won, clearly — is what makes Zodeon feel different. The typical Smashing Pumpkins record, even at its most ambitious, carries a certain Sturm und Drang: the need to prove something, to justify itself, to conquer. That’s as true of Siamese Dream as it is of 2024’s Aghori Mhori Mei. Zodeon has none of that. It’s the sound of a band making music because making music is what they do. Opening lines are often statements of intent. Machina begins with a snarled reminder that “You know I’m not dead”, Siamese Dream with a sarcastic plea to “freak out, give in”, Mellon Collie with a declaration that “Time is never time at all”. Zodeon begins with a request: “hush your mind”.

The beginning is the end is the beginning

So what does any of this mean for Smashing Pumpkins as an ongoing concern?

Corgan’s theory is that we’re entering an era where the old metrics of success — album sales, chart positions, critical acclaim in the week of release — simply don’t apply anymore. The gatekeepers have lost their power. The algorithms are chaos. And artists who build deep catalogues, who keep creating work of genuine quality, will eventually find their audience — even if that audience arrives decades late.

“You’re starting to see this incredible complex weave of my musical life and catalogue starting to kick in,” he says, “because I no longer am subservient to time or somebody else’s business model. I’m only subservient to my own.” He points to the current moment: 30-year-old Pumpkins demos trending on TikTok. The Cure, a band the music press wrote off in the nineties, now being recognised as one of the defining acts in rock history. Artists who refused to play the game are being vindicated by the chaos of the streaming age.

“My job is more custodial,” Corgan explains. “To kind of create a balance where one thing feeds into another, feeds into another.”

There’s more to come, too. The Corgan archives are stuffed with unreleased material. A Machina-era reinterpretation of American folk standards. A cycle of hometown-inspired songs called ChicagoKid recorded in the early 2000s. The unfinished Teargarden project. 2007’s maligned Zeitgeist is due for a remix that might fundamentally change how people hear it. Talk to any die-hard Pumpkins fan and they’ll list their own holy grails that will mean nothing to the casual listener: Lost tracks like ‘As Rome Burns’, ‘Gossamer’ and ‘Burnt Orange Black’. Mashed Potatoes. The Djalizwan recordings. The legendary “final” Metro show. The oft-promised Christmas album. The archives, one suspects, are deeper than anyone outside the inner circle really knows. The Zodeon release model means that Corgan can bleed these out into the world when and how he chooses.

“If somebody wanted to say, ‘Hey, Mellon Collie is the greatest thing you’ve ever done’ — okay, it’s a fair argument,” Corgan concedes. “But I’ve accepted that most of the music that I’ve done that has quality won’t be heard until after I’m gone. So I’ve made peace with that. And once you decouple from that psychologically, you no longer need to do the ‘hey, hey!’”

Lost in the forest all alone

Zodeon at Crystal Hall is, by any reasonable measure, a minor work. It’s slight. It’s unassuming. It doesn’t demand your attention the way Mellon Collie or ATUM or the more recent, excellent Aghori Mhori Mei do. But that’s precisely what makes it valuable. It’s the sketch alongside the masterwork. The private moment made public. The band without the armour on.

There’s a grace to this record, a space and a subtlety. The Mellotron hums. The guitars colour and shade and never dominate. Jimmy Chamberlin plays with understated taste and real feel. And underneath it all, William Patrick Corgan, as much as Shiny, as much as Billy, singing about endings, about acceptance, about having nothing left to prove and being okay with that.

And yes, it’s easy for a quiet moment to get lost in the clickbait roar of the 2020s. “I have this saying,” says Corgan. “If a digital tree falls in the forest, does anyone hear it? And this is a perfect indictment of that. This is a digital tree that fell in the forest. It’s a complete work, and yet [to some people] it doesn’t exist.” 

Perhaps it’s more accurate to note that this is an analogue tree falling in a digital forest, and therein lies the problem. At present, Zodeon is an album you can only get by mail order from the US and only play on vinyl. It’s not a huge surprise that it’s not achieved mass-market penetration to a public trained on Spotify’s instant gratification.  

It does exist, though. It’s sitting there, waiting to be discovered, hidden in plain sight. A proper Smashing Pumpkins album, one of the most interesting they’ve made in years, available only to those who know where to look.

Eventually, the world will catch up. Corgan’s been right about this kind of thing before. And in the meantime, the tree is standing there, waiting. And if you want to hear it fall, you know where to find it.

Zodeon at Crystal Hall is available now from Madame Zuzus (madamezuzus.com). A digital release is planned relatively soon.