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ShareCHICAGO — The Smashing Pumpkins delivered a double dose of news Tuesday about past and future recordings.
In a video posted on the band’s Facebook page, singer Billy Corgan announced that the current band — which includes no original members besides himself — will record a new album, “Oceania,” that will be released later this year. “Even though I pronounced the album dead” a few years ago, Corgan said, he says the band has a number of songs written and will begin recording them next month, with the aim of releasing an album Sept. 1. “Oceania” will be part of the massive 44-song “Teargarden by Kaleidyscope” project, in which the band has been releasing songs as free downloads soon after recording them. Details of exactly how “Oceania” will be released were not divulged.
Corgan also said that after about a decade of negotiation the band and its former label, EMI, had reached an agreement to reissue remastered versions of all the Pumpkins’ albums from the band’s first era (1991-2000) over the next three years on CD and vinyl with bonus tracks. In addition, what Corgan calls a “digital box set” will be created that will enable the band to release material from its archives “any way we want,” including free downloads. He said the archival material includes everything from the band’s early rehearsals in Chicago during the 1980s through what was to be its final show at Metro in 2000.
The first reissues will be out by Christmas this year: “Gish” (1991), “Siamese Dream” (1993) and “Pisces Iscariot” (1994). Next year, “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” (1995), “The Aeroplane Flies High” box set (1996) and “Adore” (1998) will be reissued. In 2013, the 2000 albums “Machina/The Machines of God” and “Machina II: The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music” will be packaged together “in the right order,” Corgan says, to be followed by a greatest hits compilation.
