“Zero” by The Smashing Pumpkins

"Zero" was the third single from Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, the Smashing Pumpkins' sprawling 1995 album, and it was the first song Billy Corgan and company put to tape for the project. Corgan wrote it and sings it, and he produced and mixed it alongside Flood and Alan Moulder, piling up six rhythm guitars and two 12-string acoustics plugged straight into the desk until the thing roars like a jet engine idling on the runway.

It's the Pumpkins at their most clenched: a stuttering, grinding riff, a buzzsaw guitar tone and Corgan's nasal voice sneering over the top, a perfect fit for the album's black mood. Yelena Yemchuk, the Ukrainian photographer Corgan was dating at the time, made both the cover art and the video.

It came out as a single on April 23, 1996, climbing to number 9 on America's Modern Rock Tracks and all the way to the top of Canada's Alternative 30. In America it was sold as an EP with more than four songs, too many for Billboard's singles rules, so it landed at 46 on the Billboard 200 album chart instead of the Hot 100; in Scotland it made 19 on the albums chart as a budget release. It topped the chart in Spain and reached three in New Zealand.

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