Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is the third studio album by Smashing Pumpkins, released as a sprawling two-disc set on October 23, 1995. Frontman Billy Corgan wrote and demoed dozens of songs (reports put the number near 56 or 57) before whittling the collection down to the 28 tracks that made the final sequence, split across a "Dawn to Dusk" disc and a "Twilight to Starlight" disc.

The band recorded from March to August 1995 across several Chicago studios and at the Village Recorder in Los Angeles, working with producers Flood and Alan Moulder rather than Butch Vig, who had shaped the sound of their previous album, Siamese Dream^[1]. The new production team pushed the band toward a broader, more varied palette, mixing orchestral arrangements and synthesizers with the heavy guitar sound that had defined the group, and guitarist James Iha and bassist D'Arcy Wretzky took on larger roles in the arrangements than before^[1].

Corgan resisted calling it a strict concept album, but he described its underlying idea as an exploration of what he called the human condition of mortal sorrow, pitched at a listener between the ages of roughly 14 and 24^[1]. He also compared its ambitions to Pink Floyd's The Wall, calling Mellon Collie a kind of generational statement for the alienated teenagers of the era^[1].

The album debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, an unusual feat for an expensive double album, and went on to be certified diamond by the RIAA for surpassing ten million copies sold in the United States^[1]. It received seven Grammy nominations, including Album of the Year, and won Best Hard Rock Performance; Time magazine named it the best album of 1995^[1].