Mellon Collie

Mellon Collie

Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is the third studio album by American alternative rock band the Smashing Pumpkins, released on October 23, 1995, in the United Kingdom and on October 24 in the United States on Virgin Records. Produced by frontman Billy Corgan with Flood and Alan Moulder, the 28-track album was released as a two-disc CD and triple LP. It features a wide array of musical styles, including art rock, grunge, alternative pop, and heavy metal.Propelled by its lead single "Bullet with Butterfly Wings", the album debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200 with first-week sales of 246,500 units. It remains the band's only album to top the Billboard 200. It spawned five more singles—"1979", "Zero", "Tonight, Tonight", the promotional "Muzzle" and "Thirty-Three"—over the course of 1996, and was certified diamond by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), equivalent to more than 10 million units sold in the US. Lauded by critics for its ambition and scope, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness earned the band seven Grammy Award nominations in 1997, including Album of the Year and Record of the Year ("1979"), as well as nine MTV Music Video Awards nominations, eight of which were for "Tonight, Tonight", including Video of the Year. The singles became hits on mainstream rock and modern rock stations, and "Bullet with Butterfly Wings", "1979", "Tonight, Tonight" and "Thirty-Three" became the band's first Top 40 hits, crossing over to pop radio stations. Recording sessions saw a wealth of productivity: dozens of fully completed songs were cut from the album and would surface on later releases. A box set released in November 1996 titled The Aeroplane Flies High compiled the promotional singles from the album and featured approximately 30 fully completed songs from the Mellon Collie sessions that had not made the final cut for the album (including one track, "Pastichio Medley", which contained more than 70 short snippets of songs in various states of completion). Both Mellon Collie and The Aeroplane Flies High later saw reissues that included even more tracks from the sessions.

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