25 years of the Smashing Pumpkins’ Adore

June 2, 2023

25 years ago today, in 1998, the Smashing Pumpkins put out their 4th studio album, Adore, and it sounded like no album they had put out before. The band cast aside their trademark wall-of-fuzz-guitars sound in favor of a newly light and loving quality, but the album was also tinged with a bittersweet wistfulness. After their previous album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (1995), the Pumpkins had been through a lot: their touring keyboardist died of a heroin overdose, they fired their irreplaceable drummer Jimmy Chamberlin (who also had a heroin problem — fortunately he was able to rejoin the band for later albums), and singer Billy Corgan was suffering one personal loss on top of another with the death of his mother and the end of his marriage.

Adore was a commercial disappointment for the band at the time, but it’s become a fan favorite. That’s reflected in my own history with the album: when I first heard it I thought the Pumpkins had lost their spark, but today I listened to it from beginning to end and felt like I finally appreciated it. It helps that by now I’ve seen the band play some of the songs in a great concert in New York City in 2018. I remember watching Corgan put aside his guitar in the middle of the show and go up to a higher level to play piano while singing this poignant ballad about his late mother, “For Martha”:

Maybe this is the album that should’ve been called Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.