If you’ve ever paid attention to The Smashing Pumpkins – not just the sound but the mythology, the tantrums, the bald ambition of it all – you’ll know Billy Corgan has long treated music less as a career and more as a divine crusade. He once described his art as a ‘true narrative,’ only to watch, in his words, ‘people quite cleverly try to disassemble what I’d actually built.’ Translation: he’s never been one for subtlety. Or brevity.
This year, the band returns to Bangkok for the first time in 29 years. Yes, twenty-nine. Their last appearance on Thai soil was at the Thai-Japanese Stadium in 1996, back when ‘1979’ was still fresh enough to feel prophetic rather than nostalgic. This time, they’ll take the stage at Union Hall on Wednesday, October 1 – part of a long-overdue Asian tour that also includes dates in Japan, South Korea and the Philippines.
For the uninitiated, The Smashing Pumpkins are the goth-adjacent, guitar-heavy architects of alt-rock’s most theatrical moments. They were moody before moody was a brand. Their 1995 double album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness remains one of the most ambitious records of the decade – part concept album, part existential cry into the void. Tracks like ‘Tonight, Tonight’ and ‘Bullet with Butterfly Wings’ weren’t just radio staples; they were angst anthems for anyone who felt dislocated by their own youth.
Corgan, with his monk-like dome and Nietzschean one-liners, has remained an enduring (if polarising) figure in music – part provocateur, part poet, wholly convinced of his own genius. Yet for all the myth-making, the band’s return to Thailand feels less like a legacy act cashing in on old glories and more like a strange kind of homecoming. The music never really left; it just became harder to categorise.
Whether you’re there for the nostalgia or the noise, it’s difficult to deny the weight of their return. Three decades later, The Smashing Pumpkins are still wrestling with the void – and asking the rest of us to listen in.
See the full tour line-up through smashingpumpkins.com/tour.