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They imploded over infighting, then quietly reassembled the same trio

The Smashing Pumpkins grew out of a Chicago record store where Billy Corgan met James Iha, and the pair built a moody, Cure-influenced duo before D'arcy Wretzky joined on bass and a jazz drummer named Jimmy Chamberlin gave the band its unexpected muscle. Their 1991 debut was a scrappy underground hit, but it was the tortured, over-budget recording of their second album that turned them into stars just as alternative rock broke into the mainstream, even as old peers in the indie scene mocked them as sellouts. Their sprawling double album a couple of years later pushed them to new commercial heights and award nominations, but success came with a horrifying cost: a touring keyboardist died of an overdose on the road, and Chamberlin was fired after his own addiction surfaced publicly. The band kept reinventing itself through a colder, more electronic record made after Corgan's mother died and his marriage ended, then splintered further when Wretzky left and was replaced on tour, before Corgan announced on the radio that the band would simply end.

The story after the breakup is really about one man's refusal to let the name die. Corgan reunited with Chamberlin to make another album, toured with a rotating cast of new guitarists and bassists, then kept the band going largely alone through an ambitious, mostly-free internet song project and a string of albums released in fragments rather than as a single comeback statement. Chamberlin eventually left again, came back as a touring member, and finally rejoined properly alongside Iha, reconstituting three of the four original members for new records and arena tours, while Wretzky's attempts to return became a point of public dispute between her and Corgan. More recent years have brought a guitarist's amicable departure, an open casting call that drew thousands of guitar submissions, a new rock-opera trilogy tied back to the band's 1990s concept albums, and reissues that recombine old, commercially shelved material into newly resequenced box sets.

Musically, the band was always a magpie, splicing heavy metal, goth and post-punk, shoegaze, psychedelia and eventually electronica into Corgan's densely overdubbed arrangements, sometimes stacking dozens of guitar tracks onto a single song. That studio-built sound, inspired by seventies arena rock as much as by British shoegaze bands, made some songs nearly impossible to reproduce live and pushed the band toward dramatic shifts between quiet and loud passages. Despite Corgan's reputation for being domineering and prone to writing nearly all the instrumental parts himself, the band's videos and visual style were praised as genuinely inventive rather than mere advertising, and acts from Deftones to My Chemical Romance have cited them as a formative influence. With tens of millions of albums sold and two records regularly ranked among the best of their era, they remain mostly a vehicle for Corgan's singular, often turbulent vision rather than a conventional four-piece group.

Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, a sprawling double album, entered the Billboard 200 at number one and earned a Diamond certification from the RIAA.

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