Ratboys – Singin' to an Empty Chair | Album Review

New West Records

Snowed in. Roads iced over. Trying on New Year’s resolutions and dropping New Year’s resolutions. What else is there to do at this time of year but think about last year? Openly celebrate what went right and privately obsess over what went wrong. Why did that one thing happen? How can you make sure it never happens again? Why did they say that to you? What should you have said back? Why didn’t they talk to you after that? Why didn’t they listen to you? Why didn’t you try harder to make them stay?

Julia Steiner, frontwoman of Ratboys, got the title for the band’s latest album, Singin' to an Empty Chair, from a therapy tool called The Empty Chair Technique. The premise of the exercise is simple on paper: you imagine that someone you want to have a difficult conversation with is sitting right across from you, and you have that complicated conversation. Alone. But this is obviously easier said than done. Actually mustering up the courage to verbalize the words you have kept buried for so long, to even say them by yourself, is intimidating. Gathering the courage to admit wrong, to share a secret, to ask for better, to try again, is an impossible feeling. Ratboys know this well.

Singin' to an Empty Chair is the sixth album from the Chicago indie stars and their first release on New West Records. This album also marks their second collaboration with Chris Walla of Death Cab for Cutie, who also produced 2023’s The Window. Steiner described their last album as a “dedicated and intentional process,” the product of a meticulous couple years of writing and rehearsing before recording anything officially. Singin' to an Empty Chair offers a different perspective. Bassist Sean Neumann describes this record as a quilt – a collection of songs written in different places and recorded in different spaces. This patchwork approach is pieced together by songs describing half-conversations and one-sided admittances, all sewn together with their signature mind-bending guitar and twangy lilt. 

Photo by MILES KALCHIK

Where were you while we were getting high? Wanna go for a ride? On “Open Up,” Steiner adds to the canon of great rock music questions when she asks, “What’s it gonna take to open up tonight?” She asks this over the confident strum of a guitar, but as the song builds, Steiner’s bright voice is interjected by sparks of the rest of the band, a moment of fuzz here, a kick drum there, before building into a folksy jam. The whole band is firing on all cylinders, and the only place to go from here is the stars.

Ratboys’ greatest sleight of hand is their cosmic bend, and they are very precise with how they blend it into their twang. On their last album, Ratboys took listeners to the brink of the world on “Black Earth, WI.” On Singin' to an Empty Chair, Ratboys avoid their own beaten path but find a new supersonic twist on “Light Night Mountains All That.” The song starts by sweeping you off your feet, sending you into a vortex of Dave Sagan’s swirling guitar and the uncanny rhythm of Marcus Nuccio’s drumming. At first, Steiner’s voice steadies the spinning, repeating an increasingly frustrated accusation that “you didn’t care.” Her voice, while always clear and measured, builds and builds until it’s blistering because “you didn’t care / you didn’t care / you didn’t / care!” This irritation seems to blow a hole in the vortex, turning Sagan’s guitar into something more intergalactic. 

The music video released alongside this single matches its extraterrestrial spin. Styled like a found-footage horror film, some kind of haunting evil forces invade while the band plays their song. The ghouls flicker in and out of the video, almost like they’re interfering with the signal, until they’re playing the song too. This cataclysmic feeling Ratboys spin is one of their most exciting tricks—a soundtrack for the final frontier. 

Just because we’re singing to an empty chair here and embracing conversations we hesitate to have does not mean that every imagined conversation has to be upsetting or frustrating. It’s hard to admit how much you love someone, too. In “Penny in the Lake,” serene optimism is conveyed through berry pies, Ringo Starr, and the breathless crow of a rooster. “Strange Love” is an earnest confession that conjures slightly sweaty palms, and “Anywhere” evokes a vulnerable, but freeing feeling, like admittance with avoidant eye contact. 

The title of the album appears in “Just Want You to Know the Truth,” the album’s 8-minute bittersweet barnstormer. Across a mournful pedal steel, Steiner weaves snapshots of a past she can’t return to: construction sites, lasagna on Christmas Eve, and Antiques Roadshow. The emotional core of the album is buried somewhere in the sawdust of this song, between Steiner’s aching lyrics and Sagan’s biting guitar. The resonance of the Empty Chair Technique is laid bare as Steiner grimly sings “A couple some odd years ago / You said, ‘Sweetie take your time’ / So now I’m singin’ to an empty chair / Bleedin’ out every line.” It’s a punishing admonishment about forgiveness and time, combined with a cathartic release of finally saying something, even if it's alone.

The album closes with two opposed songs. The penultimate track, “Burn it Down,” while starting syrupy, turns incendiary as the band unleashes a fury they have tamped down for five albums. Steiner gives in to the doom built up by the song’s ferocious sound, just for a moment, saying, “It’s always been this way / It’s never gonna change.” But this anger washes away. The album ends on “At Peace in the Hundred Acre Woods” offering a bookend to the breezy sound that it began with. It’s a swaying, reassuring song, something that is supposed to play softly from a speaker on your patio while you’re talking to an empty lawn chair. 

On “Just Want You to Know the Truth,” Steiner sings, “Well, it’s not what you did / it’s what you didn’t do / I just want you to know the truth.” It was here, as I was caught in my thoughts about 2025 and my weirdest, lowest points, that I understood the Empty Chair Technique. It’s not just about addressing the truth, but verbalizing what you need to get to the truth. Since then, I’ve been thinking about who I want to talk to in the empty chair next to me. The blue one next to the couch I’m writing this on. What truth do I need to be made real? What about you? Who is in your empty chair? What do you want to tell them?

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Caro Alt (she/her) is from New Orleans, Louisiana, and if she could be anyone in The Simpsons, she would be Milhouse.

Blackwater Holylight – Not Here Not Gone Review

Suicide Squeeze Records

When it comes to stoner rock, sometimes it feels like there’s little room for the form to expand. So often, bands fall into tar pits as they rehash the same trite lyrics and recycle the same five sludgy riffs. For titans like Sleep, this genre can be taken to bong-ripping heights, but other acts like The Sword iterate until they become parodies of their earlier, more exciting selves. If they are averse to marijuana mysticism, a band might instead go down the path of the thousand-dollar leather jacket and embrace more of a desert rock direction. Queens of the Stone Age make this look cool, but most of the time you’ll end up sounding like Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. So how do you inject new life into a style that often reads as riff-by-numbers? You abandon it almost entirely.

That’s exactly what Blackwater Holylight have done. On their first two albums, the Portland, Oregon, group’s sound was dripping in bluesy, chugging 70’s hard rock. They were proficient in their Sabbath worship, but not altogether original. In fact, 2019’s Veils of Winter is so entrenched in the desert-doom sound that it literally has a song titled “Motorcycle.” These are good albums, but it’s clear that the risk was there for them to become trapped in the endless cycle of cannabinoid riffage. The band’s third album, Silence/Motion, was a massive reimagining of their music as the group became darker and more dreamlike, adding in elements of prog and shoegaze. The result is something simultaneously refined and menacing, but what makes it so impressive is that it’s very clearly the same band that made the first two records.

On Blackwater Holylight’s new album, Not Here Not Gone, the group is continuing to evolve their artistry while remaining true to their roots. After relocating to LA and working with producer Sonny Diperri (Narrow Head, DIIV, Emma Ruth Rundle), the trio has cultivated a vicious doomgaze sound that is equal parts punishing and ethereal. The album opens with “How Will You Feel,” which immediately signals that Blackwater Holylight is continuing to push the limits of their expression. The track features fuzzed-out, crunchy guitars that are more akin to early My Bloody Valentine than Truckfighters as singer Sunny Faris’ voice floats serenely above the chaos. 

On tracks “Bodies” and “Spades,” guitarist Mikayla Mayhew blurts out concussive, mosh-inducing riffs that are backed by airy synth work from Sarah McKenna. It’s this constant contrast that makes the songs on Not Here Not Gone so engaging; just when you think you’ve got them figured out, they shift into a new direction. Single “Fade” finds them branching out into the vast world of post-rock with a confidence that would have you think they’ve been making songs like this for twenty years. Album interlude “Giraffe” is the band’s biggest experiment yet as they jam over a beat from Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio. The collaboration results in a slice of industrial rock that could fit in seamlessly on the tracklist of The Fragile. Despite all of these progressions, Blackwater Holylight hasn’t forgotten that, at the end of the day, they descend from Black Sabbath. This is best heard on the seven-minute closer “Poppyfields,” which weaves elements of black and doom metal and gives Eliese Dorsay an opportunity to truly beat the shit out of her drums. All of this is done in the service of creating a brooding, tension-filled piece that ends the album on a powerful note.

All of this is what makes Blackwater Holylight such an impressive band. Rather than coming out of the gates hot on their first album or two and then fizzling out in attempts to recapture that energy or flailing through desperate experimentation, the group has steadily and deftly adapted their sound. They’re the kind of band that makes you want to continue to follow their career because you’re actually excited to hear what they’ll do next, rather than clenching your jaw in hopes that they stick the landing. While Blackwater Holylight might not be a textbook desert rock or stoner doom band anymore, they fit in at Austin’s Levitation Fest as much as they do at Roadburn in the Netherlands. Blackwater Holylight refuse to be contained by the constraints or expectations of genre, charting their course on their own terms. They're far from the first musicians to do this, and they're certainly not the last, but in a genre that is loaded with copycats, they're a shining example of changing and molting until you reach the truest version of yourself. Odds are, people will recognize that and be drawn to it because when everything else can be found in excess, the things that are actually unique speak for themselves.

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Connor is an English professor in the Bay Area, where he lives with his partner and their cat and dog, Toni and Hachi. When he isn’t listening to music or writing about killer riffs, Connor is reading fiction and obsessing over sports.

Ferris Wheel Regulars – Back in the Jetstream | Album Review

Hunkofplastic Records

A few summers back, I took a trip to DC for the 2024 edition of HFStival, an attempt to revive the long-defunct fest that had been a must-stop in the late 90s and early 2000s for alt rock radio’s top bands. The 2024 lineup was made up mostly of groups that were big during the festival’s heyday—think Tonic, Lit, Filter, etc.—with Death Cab for Cutie and the Postal Service closing out the show. I mostly went to catch Postal Service and Jimmy Eat World, but neither band was at the top of my mind as I walked out of Nationals Park at the end of the night. What stuck with me were two things:

1. People are feral (sexually) for Gavin Rossdale in a way that I did not anticipate.

2. Incubus rule. 

I tried to push the first thought out of my head by mulling over the second. I used to love Incubus back when I was in middle school, but I totally fell off listening to them when most other people did. Seeing the band live made me regret throwing them aside, and it also got me thinking about their legacy. This was right around the time that the Deftones resurgence was at its height, where it felt like you couldn’t open Instagram without hearing a new band using them as a sonic reference point. Could something similar happen for their contemporaries in Incubus?

As 2024 turned to 2025, the answer appeared to be a resounding no, and as 2025 rolled on, that no only got louder, so I stopped thinking about it. Then, I started listening to this new Ferris Wheel Regulars record, Back in the Jetstream. When I got to track three, “Dragonflies,” and heard the opening lines “There’s no other way / To say I love you / I find it kinda strange / The way the clouds move,” a subtle pang in the vocals and the timbre of the guitars immediately brought me back to the first time I heard Morning View. This is what I was looking for. 

Before I get over my skis here, I want to make clear that I’m not trying to say that this record rises to the level of straight-up Incubus worship; Ferris Wheel Regulars are not treating Brandon Boyd the way that The Gaslight Anthem treats Bruce Springsteen. At its core, this is more of a post-hardcore record than anything else, though the record’s shoegaze and “space rock” tags on Bandcamp also make groups like Hum an easy reference to reach for. Still, there’s just so much here—the soft to loud shifts, sledgehammer distortion, the digital processing on breakdowns—that presents what I was looking for when I started hoping to see more Incubus pulls in contemporary music. It’s part of the palette in a way that’s very compelling to me. For example, “Trajectory” pulls from a similar bag of tricks as “Nowhere Fast,” from the shift in character between verse and chorus to the feedback sounds over the closing fade out. I love to see it. 

Back in the Jetstream is Ferris Wheel Regulars’ third record, but they’re a band that’s new to me, first coming onto my radar last December when I started to see hype for lead single “Wires Cut for Two” on Twitter. What most impressed me about the track when I first listened to it was that the group didn’t treat their soft sections as an afterthought. Sometimes when I listen to bands whose bread and butter is heavy/distorted guitar, it’s clear that they’re only getting softer to create contrast for contrast’s sake. Ferris Wheel Regulars are at their best when they’re noisy, but when they pull back—like on the first verse of “Wires Cut for Two”—the music is still inspired, letting the vocals shine through and leaving room for more agile guitar work. 

Where Ferris Wheel Regulars really excel though is when they fully step on it, like the closing breakdown of “Scarlet,” where screaming vocals come in to duel with the main voice line and a heavy rendition of the song’s main riff. The interlude after the first verse of “Moves Like Clouds,” with its soaring guitar lead, is another section that only sounds better the more you turn up the volume. It’s music made to make your windows shake.

Another thing that really stood out to me about this record was its thematic consistency. This is most obviously appreciated when you look at its bookends, with “Sister Star’s” refrain of “Take me out there / Somewhere Far / There’s blue out there / Somewhere far” morphing into “Take me out there / Somewhere far / Feels good nowhere / Just like stars” as the album closes with “Just Like Stars.” In between those two moments, the sky is a constant presence throughout the album, mentioned in every track, sometimes presented as a balm and other times as cold comfort. Particularly striking to me is the opening of “Simple Systems,” where we hear the lines: “You’ll see the sunrise / Winter follows mine.” There’s this economy of words that you can only really tap into when you’re laser-focused on something as universal as the sky above. Because we’re seeing the heavens hit again and again throughout the record, there’s this cumulative impact that makes that “Feels good nowhere / Just like stars” hit so incredibly hard. 

This speaks to what is perhaps my favorite thing about Back in the Jetstream, the fact that it’s a record that doesn’t wink at you. Though influences of 90s post-hardcore and 2000s alternative come through clearly in the music, there’s nothing about the presentation that’s trying to be meta about it; there’s no cutesy song titles or comedic interludes, nothing memeified. There’s room for all kinds of music with different tones and moods out there, but the straightforward and earnest approach that we see here is what resonates with me the most. Because of this approach, you get to see the music standing on its own, compelling not because it makes you feel like you’re in on something, but because someone is truly letting you in. When you do hear pieces of artists from the past poking through, it feels more reverential than referential, the sum of a lifetime of listening to music spilling out rather than a choice made to seem clever. You don’t need to be well-versed in the encyclopedia of emo to get what’s going on here; it’s just very good music that’s ready to meet you where you’re at, and you can’t really ask for much more than that. 

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Josh Ejnes is a writer and musician living in Chicago. He has a blog about cassette tapes called Tape Study that you can find here, and he also makes music under the name Cutaway Car.

Dry Cleaning – Secret Love | Album Review

4AD

I threw my hair into space buns as I ran ten blocks from my late shift at the library to catch Dry Cleaning at Webster Hall. This was the band’s second US tour post-lockdown, and friends I made in line for a Mannequin Pussy show months ago were saving me a spot on the barricade. At that first meeting, I’d ached to come out as trans, shameful to be seen as a man taking up space, and desperate to express the femininity I related to so deeply. When I joined them on the floor at Webster Hall, Lily complimented my hair, and I immediately blurted out my confession. There was no better place to do it than a Dry Cleaning show. 

Since their initial duo of EPs in 2019, Dry Cleaning has undergone subtle shifts that have refined their style to its core elements. Their debut LP, New Long Leg, was less outwardly caustic, resulting in a creepier, more sinister record, while 2022’s Stumpwork included Florence Shaw almost singing and the band diving deeper into constructing haunting grooves. 

Over the last four years, with the production help of Cate Le Bon, Dry Cleaning have once again burrowed deeper into themselves and emerged with Secret Love, their finest record yet. Secret Love is an expansive album with lyrics that explore the genocide in Palestine, gender roles, manosphere food influencers, and the search for love, all while the instrumentals bounce from hardcore punk to jangle pop and synth ballads. All of these influences and topics coalesce around a single question: how do you live an authentic life today?

Dry Cleaning has always had hooks. So many of Shaw’s lines have the uncanny ability to become instantly inscribed in listeners’ brains as if they’d always been there. The first time I heard her declare “never talk about your ex / never, never, never, never / never slag them off because then they know / then they know,” I could tell I would be screaming it at friends while commiserating breakups for the rest of my life. Then there was her sigh of “must I look at my belly in the mirror” on “Every Day Carry,” which stuck with me as someone who hated everything she saw in the mirror. Few bands have drum rolls I want to sing along to, like on “More Big Birds,” guitar lines I want to whisper into my lover's ear like on “Viking Hair,” or bass lines I want to murmur as I shake mourners' hands at a funeral like on “No Decent Shoes For Rain.”  

I once met Florence Shaw after a show and got to tell her how essential the Dry Cleaning records have been to my transition. She replied that she was grateful they helped, as her lyrics speak to her own feelings of disaffection with the world, and on Secret Love, she reveals more of her soft underbelly than she ever previously allowed. On “Let Me Grow and You’ll See the Fruit,” she sings about how “people move away from me / I constantly think there are spiders on me and around me.” As someone who bristled anytime I was asked to turn to my neighbor and share during class, when she recites these lines, I’m reminded of the lecture halls full of classmates who paired off and left me alone. The following line, “I yearn for a friend who I can tell my secrets to,” cuts when all your life has felt like desperately waiting for someone to understand you so innately that you don’t have to speak. Alongside Shaw’s pained vocals, I want to travel back in time to hold my past self and whisper this track's sighing horns to her in an attempt to help her understand that everything will be okay. 

Then there is Shaw’s love of tidying, as detailed on “My Soul / Half Pint,” where she discusses how much joy organizing her possessions and assigning them set places in her home provides. But don’t get her confused; she doesn’t love cleaning, in fact, she “find[s] cleaning demeaning.” Over a strutting instrumental, she resents the implication that, as a woman, she should be the one cleaning. At each piano-key plink, you feel her shaking off the expectations her gender assigned to her. It’s simply thrilling. 

The group returns to objects of love on “The Cute Things” and “I Need You,” as Shaw describes the sacrifices one makes for their partner over a whimsical, drifting melody on the former and a synth mire of want on the latter. “I Need You” contains one of the most unexpected references Shaw has ever made in her lyrics, likening the selection of a lover to Donald Trump picking an Apprentice. It’s an unsettling comparison to make, but isn’t love by definition unsettling? If love weren’t unsettling, the sacrifices made in pursuit wouldn’t be worth it. 

When Shaw looks towards the larger world, she sees manipulation everywhere: “objects outside the head control the mind / to arrange them is to control people’s thinking,” she sings on the lead single “Hit My Head All Day.” That track slinks along seductively as Cate Le Bon’s production almost turns the band into a pick-up artist. They stay in the realm of bad advice givers on “Evil Evil Idiot,” one of the most aptly titled tracks in the band’s discography, as Shaw takes on the perspective of a man who only eats food that has been burnt so severely it may as well just be charcoal. Tom Dowse’s guitar springs into the mix like a performer jumping into your face from around the corner of a good haunted house. “Evil Evil Idiot” perfectly captures the feeling of radicalization, showing how people descend from normal fears like ingesting too many microplastics to refusing to even let black plastic touch their food. 

“Evil Evil Idiot” is an excellent example of Shaw’s newfound strength in writing explicitly from manipulative characters’ perspectives. But it is not just the exaggerated personalities she’s interested in, elsewhere she looks at the mundanities of life. On “Cruise Ship Designer,” she takes on the titular job and forces you to listen to someone justify their career choice. When contrasted with the late-album highlight “Blood,” the cruise ship designer seems quaint, but Shaw understands he is just as insidious as a drone pilot. One provides escapism from the terrors of the world that the other enacts with the cold detachment provided by distance. On the latter, over a constant beat that pounds away like the thrum of violence that undergirds society, she sings about looking away from tragedy: “I’ve shown my arse now.”

Dry Cleaning’s advice after all these challenges to living a good life? Caring. After being confronted with dozens of obstacles to happiness as described on “Rocks,” Shaw sings on the final track, “Don’t give up on being sweet.” You never know what can come from putting kindness and empathy into the world. In the face of malicious actors, sweetness could be what builds a better world. 

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Lillian Weber is a fake librarian in NYC. She writes about gender, music, and other inane thoughts on her substack, all my selves aligned. You can follow her on Insta @Lilllianmweber.

Smashing Pumpkins Misunderstood Madness of Machina: 25 Years Later

Photo by David Williams

In the spring of 1999, Billy Corgan plotted a scheme to snatch back the title of rock n’ roll king. This was coming just a year after a turbulent reception to his band’s fourth studio record, the unjustly maligned Adore. The public, it seemed, was not ready for The Smashing Pumpkins to turn their signature stadium-level rock into an intimate, ballad-heavy experience with an abundance of synths. The album failed to reach the sky-high peak of Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness, which was an impossible feat to achieve (that record sold so much it went diamond), especially given the electronic-goth pivot they executed on Adore. The Pumpkins became victims of their own success; the number one band of the mid-’90s was hit with devastating adversity heading into the new millennium.

Around this era, music shifted away from the grunge movement that defined the early part of the decade. In many ways, this was rock music’s last gasp at the forefront of the cultural zeitgeist. Bands like Pearl Jam and Nirvana were replaced by boy bands, hip-hop, and a fresh wave of aggro rock music dubbed nu-metal. TRL was my barometer for culture at this time: every day when I got home from school, I’d tune in at 4 PM Central Time to watch Carson Daly introduce videos from Britney Spears, NSYNC, Jay-Z, and Limp Bizkit. The bands of the early ‘90s were essentially pushed aside like Brussels sprouts at the kids’ table during Thanksgiving.

Rock music was in an undeniable state of transition during this period, with nu-metal leading the charge as a louder, angrier, and more aggressive offering. Groups like Limp Bizkit, Deftones, Kid Rock, Korn, and Rob Zombie were the bands that people wanted to listen to as the Y2K era approached. For a super-specific example, consider the entrance music of WWE legend The Undertaker. When he had his biker gimmick, The Undertaker introduced this era by coming out to Kid Rock’s “American Bad Ass,” but by the time the new millennium rolled around, he shifted to Limp Bizkit’s “Rollin’ (Air Raid Vehicle).” And don’t even get me started on the Mission: Impossible 2 soundtrack; if someone wanted to know what this era sounded like, just go listen to that album. It didn’t matter what the content was culturally; if a studio wanted commercially friendly rock songs attached to their product, they were going to be knocking on a nu-metal band’s doors. 

So, going back to the Pumpkins, Billy Corgan wanted to compete as if he were a top-tier athlete, testing his powers against the young guns while also aiming to make one last great record as a “fuck you” to the music industry as a whole. Feeling scorned by executives, critics, and even his own fanbase who rejected the previous record, Corgan began to conceive of a new album – a collection of songs so great that it would prove them all wrong. 

The Smashing Pumpkins, Circa 2000

But first, to even begin working toward this goal restoring the order of rock supremacy, Corgan needed drummer Jimmy Chamberlin, his hired muscle, back into the mix. Chamberlin is the merciless force that takes no prisoners behind the sticks. Songs like “Jellybelly,” “Geek U.S.A.,” and “An Ode to No One” showcase just what kind of Tasmanian Devil he truly became. Chamberlin combined his jazz background with a late-70s rock style that, I can attest after seeing his live performance, is truly a one-of-a-kind experience. Unfortunately, Chamberlin was exiled from the Pumpkins in 1996 for rampant drug use, so once he showed the ability to lead a clean lifestyle in the three years that followed, he was reinstated. Corgan said it best in an infamous Q Magazine interview that dubbed him THE RUDEST MAN IN ROCK: “If you want to know what Jimmy brings back to the band, then listen to Adore and this record back to back. It speaks for itself.”

Once Chamberlin returned, Smashing Pumpkins had all four original members back and ready to rock. James Iha, who is the Robin to Corgan’s Batman, has a reserved persona, always seemingly lurking in the shadows away from the attention of the spotlight. Iha excelled at bringing a more atmospheric ambiance to Corgan’s devastating power riffs. Meanwhile, bass player D’Arcy Wretzky has the kind of cool factor that you can only be born with. Known for her signature bleach blonde hair and nonchalant attitude, she brought an edge to the Pumpkins that no one can put an exact measure to. Wretzky was also the tastemaker of the band, where songs would often be run by her to see if they would work on records.

Photo by David Williams

Once reassembled, the band was off to the races, breaking ground on a concept album titled Machina / The Machines of God. The thought was for all the band members to play exaggerated caricatures of themselves, becoming the cartoon-like characters the public and critics viewed them as. The story of the record would revolve around a rock superstar named Zero (based on Corgan) who heard the voice of God, then renamed himself Glass and further renamed his band The Machines of God. The fans of the band are also known as the “Ghost Children.” Are you still with me? Good! Whether you think this plot is insanely convoluted or insanely brilliant, you have to admire the ambition of artists swinging for the fences with max power regardless of the outcome.

The Smashing Pumpkins, around this time, were the poster child for dysfunction. Right when the band reunited, everyone appeared to be in a harmonious kumbaya state, and the ship had finally been righted. I know their fans had to be thinking, “Ok, here we go! We’re about to get another Pumpkins classic!” Instead, something else was arriving in the shape of a neutron bomb flying in seemingly out of nowhere. Wretzky leaves the band before the recording is finished, never to return again, seemingly crushing the concept before it ever even began. When Corgan spoke to Q, he said, “I’m not going to talk about D’Arcy; she left for reasons more complicated than any single answer could hope to cover. So, I’m not going to get into that. It’s a private matter.”

In the music business, especially for a major label like Virgin, the show must go on; an album still needs to be recorded. What came out of those recordings is some of The Smashing Pumpkins’ most intriguing work to date. Opening track “The Everlasting Gaze,” which also served as the lead single from Machina, is one of my favorite songs in their entire catalog. The main attraction is the infectious cyber-metal guitar riffs that find a delicate tightrope balance of power and catchiness. Corgan repeats the opening lyrics “You know I’m not dead” nonstop as if he’s Freddy Krueger in a slasher film. No matter how hard you try, you just can’t kill the man. On top of that, when you throw in the addicting, can’t-take-my-eyes-off-it music video by Grammy award-winning director Jonas Åkerlund, the song is a can’t-miss experience. Go ahead and take a peek for yourself. This had all the ingredients for a timeless video; it’s goth, metal, theatrical, and has a leprechaun-green carpet, what more can you ask for?

Another classic that derived from this era of the Pumpkins was “Stand Inside Your Love.” This is another insane, visually entertaining music video, shot entirely in black and white and inspired by an Oscar Wilde play from 1891. The song has a new wave vibe similar to that of another Pumpkins mega-classic, “1979.” Does anyone know what “standing inside someone’s love means?” It doesn’t matter because the song is superb and is a pop hit.

One thing I appreciate about Machina, regardless of whatever dysfunction or controversy surrounded the band, was how they went for it. The Pumpkins easily could have folded and called it a day after a member left the band, but there are some seriously underrated pop songs here when you peel back the layers. “I Of The Mourning,” which, in my estimation, should have been the third single, accompanied by a music video, was essentially made for radio airwaves with that earwormy chorus. “This Time” is Corgan’s love song to the band, singing in only the way he can, “And yet it haunts me so / What we are letting go / Our spell is broken,” the words his heartfelt ode to a band that was actively being ripped to shreds. “With Every Light” is the gentlest song on Machina, and I believe that if it came out today, it would have a cult following, given how much new music coming out seems to borrow from the same spirit of this track.

Machina was caught between a rock and a hard place, regardless of the quality of the music. The public moved on from the alternative sound in the year 2000, and the convoluted concept didn’t help either. I don’t think the idea of the album was conveyed clearly enough for people to wrap their minds around while listening. Eight years after the release, Corgan reflected on the record’s failures, stating, “I think the combination of the band breaking up during that record, D’arcy leaving the band… Korn was huge at the time, Limp Bizkit was huge at the time, so the album wasn’t heavy enough. It wasn’t alternative enough; it was sort of caught between the cracks. And it was a concept record, which nobody understood. So the combination of those elements was a career-killer… Adore didn’t alienate the audience; they were just sort of like, ‘Oh, it’s not the record I want.’ Machina alienated people.”

In addition to all this, I can’t stress enough just how much Corgan had worn out his welcome with the press. From the band’s own in-fighting to the combative nature of his interviews, he didn’t do himself any favors. Goodwill was as good as eroded leading up to Machina, as Corgan would often give interviews with a played-up, standoffish persona to unsuspecting journalists. I’m a humongous wrestling fan, so I can appreciate Corgan relishing in the art of going kayfabe (presenting a staged performance as genuine or authentic), but you can’t treat an interview with Rolling Stone as if you’re cutting a promo on Stone Cold Steve Austin. That’s a recipe for a disaster, which is exactly what happened with the media on this album cycle.

Machina presents some of the most jarring “what ifs” in this era of music. What if D’Arcy never left the group? What if the story were clearer and more concise? What if Corgan got his wish and this were a double LP like Mellon Collie? Virgin Records denied Corgan this extravagance, citing the poor record sales of Adore. There was so much carryover material from Machina that there was no place to put it, so the band deployed a guerrilla marketing campaign for what would become known as Machina II. Only twenty-five vinyl copies were made and distributed to friends, with the sole mission of passing them along to the internet. That’s some forward-thinking views on online piracy for the twenty-first century to say the least.

What would become of Machina II was an artistic blend of synth-goth, dream-pop, and industrial heavy metal. This was a proper swan song for the initial run of the Pumpkins. If they had been granted the double-album treatment, I think this collection would have solidified them with one last classic to their name before bowing out in the year 2000.

Epilogue

The Machina era of The Smashing Pumpkins has reached its 25th Anniversary, and to celebrate this achievement, Billy Corgan has released a deluxe vinyl box set that collects the full story in one place. No longer do fans have to painstakingly agonize over what order the original song concepts would have been. The vinyl dubbed Machina — Aranea Alba Edition is forty-eight songs in length, complete with thirty-two bonus tracks of demos, outtakes, and live performances for the low-low price of three hundred and ninety-five dollars. If, like most folks, you find that this price is too rich for your blood, I’m sure this will hit streaming services soon enough. The year 2000 was a complicated, befuddling, and downtrodden end for the original Pumpkins lineup, but I’m happy to see that, slowly, more people are recognizing the artistic beauty of Machina, even twenty-five years later. Better late than never.

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David is a content mercenary based in Chicago. He’s also a freelance writer specializing in music, movies, and culture. His hidden talents are his mid-range jump shot and the ability to always be able to tell when someone is uncomfortable at a party. You can find him scrolling away on Instagram @davidmwill89, Twitter @Cobretti24, or Medium @davidmwms.