THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The Smashing Pumpkins’ 13th studio album, the 10-track Aghori Mhori Mei, is the followup to last year’s ambitious three-act rock opera ATUM.
After the conclusion of the two-hour, 33-song ATUM (considered a sequel to the band’s 1995 classic double album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and 2000’s Machina/The Machines of God), singer, guitarist, songwriter and bandleader Billy Corgan went back into the studio to write, produce and record whenever the band was off the road.
Says Corgan: “In the writing of this new album I became intrigued with the well-worn axiom, ‘You can’t go home again’, which I have found personally to be true in form but thought, ‘Well, what if we tried anyway?’ Not so much in looking backwards with sentimentality but rather as a means to move forward; to see if in the balance of success and failure that our ways of making music circa 1990-1996 would still inspire something revelatory.”
The band also issued a separate statement on the album that reads:
“We played this game of rock ’n’ roll for 36 years. And… had to give the knee many times to what is the first song and what is the first statement and let other people judge us by one moment in time. We felt the right way to hear this record was an intact body of work.
“Ten songs, about 45 minutes, and then let the fans decide whether or not what we’ve done is what we set out to accomplish, whether we put ourselves back in that original position, whether we were able to go home again with this record.
“We’re just gonna put it out digitally. Of course, we’re gonna put it for sale and that comes later, but we want to just put the record out. And we’re proud of what we’ve done, but we want people to hear the record as one body of work and they can decide the value of what we have done.”
