The Smashing Pumpkins Announce 30th Anniversary Edition of ‘Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness’
The super deluxe limited edition release will arrive as a 6LP set.
The Smashing Pumpkins are celebrating 30 years of their diamond-certified magnum opus, Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness, with a super deluxe limited edition 6LP reissue.
The new edition will include all-time singles like “Bullet with Butterfly Wings,” “1979,” “Zero,” and “Tonight, Tonight” plus over 80 minutes of unreleased Infinite Sadness Tour 1996 audio. Additionally, the release features a hardbound book with all-new liner notes from Billy Corgan, a custom Tarot card set, and seven frameable lithographs, all housed in a velvet-wrapped rigid slipcase in a cloth carrying bag. The album will also be available as a 4CD package, a 4CD SHM-CD package, and on digital formats.
Praised for its ambitious scope, diverse sound and emotional depth, Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness earned the band seven Grammy Award nominations, including Album of the Year and Record of the Year and is widely regarded as a cohesive, powerful work of art and one of the greatest albums of all time.
“I wrote something like over 50 songs and we recorded this entire pile of stuff,” Corgan recalled for Rolling Stone in 2012 about the album. “Flood wanted to record Mellon Collie in [our rehearsal space] Pumpkinland in Chicago, he liked the way we played in there and thought we’d be more comfortable. [Looking back] Mellon Collie is a very dark album and the production is fairly stark in some places, but there’s something about the darkness of it all that really resonated.”
In a statement about the live recordings included in the new anniversary edition, Corgan had this to say: “Unearthing these live recordings from the original lineup’s true, last large-scale tour was a labour of love, and for me certainly bittersweet,” says Corgan. “Once we blew apart in 1996, we were never quite the same—emotionally or spiritually. Thankfully, one can hear in these tapes the raw power that such nascent faith afforded us then, and the will and wisdom to persevere that followed.”
The Pumpkins will also mark the anniversary with two unique collaborations. In late November, Billy Corgan joins the Lyric Opera of Chicago for A Night of Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness, a seven-show run reimagining the album with new orchestrations, an operatic cast, and costumes by House of Gilles. The celebration continues October 21 with The Mellon Collie Sessions, a limited-edition Vosges Haut-Chocolat box set featuring six custom chocolate bars inspired by the album’s most iconic songs.
This isn’t the first monumental reissue to emerge from The Smashing Pumpkins this year. Machina—the final Smashing Pumpkins album released before the band’s initial breakup in 2000—received the box set treatment and was released on August 25 in honor of the album’s 25th anniversary.
