“Bullet With Butterfly Wings” by The Smashing Pumpkins

"Bullet With Butterfly Wings" launched Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, the Smashing Pumpkins' 1995 double album, as its lead single, and it's the sound of Billy Corgan in full fury. It sits sixth on the first disc, and it's the track that finally put the band into the American top 40.

Corgan wrote it and sings it, and he produced and mixed it with Flood and Alan Moulder. It's a coiled thing that keeps threatening to snap, with sneering, deliberate verses before the guitars come down like a landslide and Corgan's nasal whine curdles into a roar. It's huge and gnarled and it doesn't give an inch, the kind of catharsis that alternative radio couldn't get enough of.

It reached 22 on the Hot 100, sat at number two on the Modern Rock Tracks chart for six weeks and got to 4 on Album Rock Tracks. In Canada it held the top of the RPM Alternative 30 for four weeks and wound up the country's most successful rock song of 1995, and it even went to number one in Iceland. It won the Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance in 1997, and Rolling Stone ranked it 70 in its 2008 list of the 100 greatest guitar songs of all time.

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