Released: 2023

Genres: Synthpop, Alternative Rock

The Musiquarium’s ATUM Review Score: 3 out of 10

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. In 2020, The Smashing Pumpkins released CYR, their worst album yet, which was a collection of 20 terrible synthpop songs. There are 33 songs on ATUM, most of which are the same type of synth-slop found on its predecessor — that’s over two hours of bad music. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was a long album, but it had the strong songwriting to justify its length and was a generational experience. CYR was already pushing it with an hour and a half of Corgan-made synthpop. ATUM is an absolute chore — no, it’s torture. How did Billy Corgan not learn anything from the failure of CYR? What did he double down on that, when fans clearly didn’t like it?

Just like CYR, the synthesizers on ATUM all sound extremely dated. Some of the synthesizer songs on an album like The Who’s Who’s Next? sound dated by today’s standards, but that album was released in 1971 when synthesizers were still novel and revolutionary, so you can enjoy an album like that if you look at it from the perspective of somebody in the early seventies, but there is absolutely no excuse for an artist of Billy Corgan’s caliber to use such horrible synthesizers in 2023 (this is the same man that made Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness?).

Unlike CYR, there are at least a few guitar songs to offset the synth-slop, like Beguiled, The Good in Goodbye, That Which Animates the Spirit, In Lieu of Failure and Harmageddon, but anything they have going for them is completely ruined by Billy Corgan’s vocals, which sound completely shot. Sure, Billy Corgan wasn’t exactly a great singer in the band’s heyday, but even then, he was emotive, unique, and it fit the music. He cannot hit those same notes he once could and has failed to adapt his style to avoid it — you almost feel bad for him here, but it begs the question of: “does he even know how bad he sounds?”

There’s certainly a lot of competition for the worst song here (Embracer, Hooligan, The Gold Mask, Night Waves, Every Morning, Springtimes, Sojourner, The Canary Trainer, Pacer, Fireflies), but I have to go with Hooray, which is the biggest offender. It’s actually tragic to think that this is the same man who composed songs like, Today, Disarm, 1979 and Tonight, Tonight once upon a time. None of the songs on ATUM are memorable or even tolerable, and makes me think that Billy Corgan is going senile or something.

I honestly don’t know what was the most ambitious failure of 2023 between U2’s Songs of Surrender (40 acoustic remakes of their songs spread across three hours) or this — all I know is they are both way too long and self-indulgent, and are signs that both bands should call it a day, as they are retroactively destroying their own legacies. Atum is Portuguese for tuna, and just like tuna, this album reeks.

For credit breakdowns and historic release details, view The Smashing Pumpkins on Discogs.

Back to the 2023 Album Guide or the The Smashing Pumpkins Reviews page.

Written by Brett Nippard