Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness by The Smashing Pumpkins

Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, the Smashing Pumpkins' third album, came out on Virgin in October 1995, and Billy Corgan wasn't interested in doing anything by halves. Twenty-eight tracks sprawled across two CDs or three slabs of vinyl, co-produced by Corgan with Flood and Alan Moulder, and it swings from art rock to grunge to flat-out heavy metal without warning, as if he were trying to cram an entire decade's worth of adolescence into one package.

"Bullet with Butterfly Wings" was the first shot, a sulky whisper that erupts into a roar. "1979" is the other extreme, a hazy, loop-driven daydream. "Tonight, Tonight" goes for the stars with sweeping, cinematic grandeur; "Zero" is all grinding riffs and cold spite. The singles kept coming through 1996, with "Muzzle" and "Thirty-Three" following, and they crossed from modern rock stations to mainstream rock and pop radio, giving the band their first Top 40 hits.

It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, the only Pumpkins album to get there, with first-week sales of 246,500, and it went on to be certified diamond for ten million sold in America. The sessions were so productive that dozens of finished songs were left over, about 30 of them turning up on The Aeroplane Flies High box set in November 1996. Critics praised its ambition, and at the Grammys in 1997 it was up for seven awards, Album of the Year among them, with "1979" in the running for Record of the Year.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.