“Pug” by The Smashing Pumpkins

"Pug" comes off Adore, the fourth Smashing Pumpkins album, which Virgin released in June 1998. Billy Corgan wrote it alone, produced it and mixed it with Flood, and with Jimmy Chamberlin gone, Joey Waronker sits behind the kit. Robbie Adams, Neil Perry and Howard Willing engineered.

The album around it was made under a cloud: a band dragging old tensions into the studio and unsure where to go after three increasingly big rock records, Corgan coping with a divorce and losing his mother, and no official drummer. What came out was hushed and shot through with electronics, a record Rolling Stone's Greg Kot called "a complete break with the past". It split the fan base, but the critics were largely on its side, and it gave the band a third straight Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Music Performance.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz.