Smashing Pumpkins are streaming their new album, Oceania, online via iTunes. Visit iTunes.com to hear the record. The album isn't formally released until next Monday (June 18), but can be heard in full now. The album is the seventh full-length effort of the band's career. Oceania, which was origi...
Smashing Pumpkins are streaming their new album, Oceania, online via iTunes. Visit iTunes.com to hear the record.
The album isn’t formally released until next Monday (June 18), but can be heard in full now. The album is the seventh full-length effort of the band’s career.
Oceania, which was originally due last September, will now be released on June 18 and has been described as an “album within an album” as it is part of their 44-song cycle ‘Teargarden By Kaleidyscope‘, the first songs for which were released in 2009.
The record will be put out by EMI, who announced earlier this year that they had inked a deal to release the record with singer Billy Corgan‘s label Martha’s Music. It features a total of 13 tracks.
Speaking about the album, Corgan said: “I was dead set on making an album where every song was just as valuable as any other, ignoring the typical claptrap you hear about needing a single. The only way to make the case that every song on Oceania is worth hearing is to put your heart into the sequence as a cohesive whole. Once we felt we’d achieved that balance, only then did we let anyone outside our world hear the record we’d made.”
The album is the band’s first recorded effort with their new line-up, which now features Mike Byrne on drums, Nicole Fiorentino on bass and Jeff Schroeder on guitar, with Corgan keen to stress that they have recorded the album as a band, rather than as himself and session musicians.
He said: “I’ve been adamant in stressing that, as a group, first and foremost, we are here to make new music together. Jeff, Mike, and Nicole have all made significant contributions to the tone and texture of ‘Oceania’, which is an album that is unlike any I’ve ever made. Yet at the same time I believe it upholds the same musical values I’ve always pushed for with the Pumpkins, be they progressive, emotional, epic, or restless.”
To read an exclusive new interview with Billy Corgan in which he discusses the making of ‘Oceania’, his career in the Smashing Pumpkins, Courtney Love and which member of his old line-up he’s cool with and who he thinks is “a piece of shit”., pick up the new issue of NME, which is on newsstands tomorrow (June 13) or available digitally.
The tracklisting for ‘Oceania’ is as follows:
‘Quasar’
‘Panopticon’
‘The Celestials’
‘Violet Rays’
‘My Love Is Winter’
‘One Diamond, One Heart’
‘Pinwheels’
‘Oceania’
‘Pale Horse’
‘The Chimera’
‘Glissandra’
‘Inkless’
‘Wildflower’