Sometimes bands shouldn’t be trusted to revisit their own material, as the latest Smashing Pumpkins reissue set proves

It has become clear in recent years that Billy Corgan loves Machina/The Machines Of God a lot more than anyone else does. Corgan has spent a good few years navigating legal wranglings and going through old masters recorded for the reissue of the final record released by the original Smashing Pumpkins line-up (albeit with a twist, because founding bassist D’Arcy left during recording) and the set was finally released as Machina – Aranea Alba Edition on his Corgan’s own Madame ZuZu site last month.

It is, Corgan has explained, the project as he first envisioned it, a mammoth 48-track album plus 32 bonus tracks of outtakes, demos and live recordings. The original release was a fractured, disjointed process befitting a band who were falling apart. Machina/The Machines Of God was released in February 2000, with the plan being that a sister record, Machina II/The Friends And Enemies Of Modern Music, would follow later that year – Corgan’s idea to release them as a double-album had been vetoed by Virgin, the Pumpkins’ record label at the time.

But when it came to release Machina II, Virgin had decided they didn’t want to do that either. The Pumpkins, they’d seemed to decide, were spent as a commercial entity, quite a mad turnaround given how just five years previously, their masterpiece (and also double, very long) third album Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness, had amassed sales in the multi-millions.

In what now looks like a trailblazing move, a disgruntled Corgan pressed up 25 copies of Machina II on vinyl, handed them out to friends and key industry allies and instructed that it be uploaded to the internet for free. It was released into the digital wild on September 5, 2000 – 25 years ago this week. A network of Pumpkins fans mobilised and help spread the word – I got my copy by sending the cost of an empty CD and postage to someone in Birmingham, who burnt it for me and posted me the record (and yes, that does make me feel old).

It was quite a thrilling, novel way to hear a new album by one of your favourite bands, even if it did feel like the quality could’ve been better – there was a bit of a hiss on the majority of rips, probably down to transferring it from a vinyl original. But there was much to marvel at, song-wise: the rollicking glam-metal of Cash Car Star, the yearning epic Let Me Give The World To You (originally recorded for Adore with Rick Rubin but kept on the shelf until that record got its own deluxe box set edition years later), the Mellon Collie-style crunching riffs of Dross, the enjoyable silly thrashing of Glass’ Theme.

A lot of these songs, you realised immediately, were much better than some of the material that had got onto Machina/The Machines Of God. Why hadn’t they made the cut? The overarching concept was the tale of a rock star gone mad, Corgan said – go figure.

The new box set is meant as a course correction for a project that never had the label support Corgan was pining for, collating the recordings into a new 48-track running order. And there is the problem (if, for the purpose of this piece, we’re not considering a price tag ranging from £313 to £431 a problem). What the Machina albums needed was to be refined into a killer, single album, not made even bigger and more excessive than they were in the first place. The ambitious ideas at the heart of these songs could do with a streamlined counterpoint.

Corgan would still be left with all the outtakes he’d need to show fans the wider scope but by cramming more songs into an already overly-bombastic picture, he’s missed the chance to truly show there was a brilliant Pumpkins record lurking somewhere in the Machina era. The problem – and it happens with artists of a certain, ‘don’t you dare question my artistic authority!’ bent – is that Corgan is probably not the man to find it. He steadfastly believes in the rejigged album’s genius. “When people hear the reconstituted album,” he told Rolling Stone, “which is now just called Machina, which is what it was originally meant to be, I think they’ll find it quite shocking… I think it’s as powerful as anything we've ever done and some would argue it's even more powerful.”

You could probably take Corgan’s use of “some” there to be a substitute for “I”, because “a lot” of fans would also argue the case for this 12-track record:

1. Glass’s Theme
2. The Everlasting Gaze
3. Stand Inside Your Love
4. Here’s To The Atom Bomb
5. Dross
6. Try, Try, Try (Version 1)
7. Let Me Give The World To You
8. With Every Light
9. Cash Car Star
10. Go
11. Real Love
12. Age Of Innocence

There you go. That’s the record the 2025 take on Machina should’ve been. And that’s not knocking Corgan’s lofty ambition – he could’ve easily done that alongside his grandiose 42-song plan. Sometimes the little picture is as impactful as the big one. And cheaper. There isn’t a date as of yet for the full Machina’s arrival on streaming platforms, only a reimagined version of the original Machina/The Machines Of God (you guessed it – he made it longer). But hopefully there will be and, if it happens, try out this tracklisting. It makes for a fitting send-off to the Pumpkins mark 1. Maybe Billy Corgan could try it too, and see that bigger isn’t always better.