Listen to Smashing Pumpkins’ New Song ‘Knights of Malta’
The Smashing Pumpkins have released a new song called “Knights of Malta,” which opens their upcoming album Shiny and Oh So Bright, Vol. 1 / LP: No Past. No Future. No Sun. The LP arrives on Nov. 16.
Billy Corgan reunited with James Iha and Jimmy Chamberlin for the eight-track work, which also features bassist Jeff Schroeder, but doesn’t include D’Arcy Wretsky after she and Corgan failed to agree on terms for her return. The band has been touring to mark its 30th anniversary, with shows booked until Dec. 8.
You can listen to "Knights of Malta" below.
“I would say this is the happiest time of the band,” Corgan said earlier this year. “It’s a bit akin to trying to rekindle a romance almost two decades later. The love is there, but, you know, is the language? Is the magic there?” He added that new music “just poured out” when they’d started working together, and they were able to “pick up where this unit left off.”
Regarding the original lineup’s collapse in the ‘90s, the frontman admitted his outspoken character had lost its effect, making him come across as a “class-A heel.” “To my discredit, I didn’t realize that that formula only works if you’re winning commercially,” he noted.
Reflecting that, once things were more challenging, he seemed to be “a jerk with a bad message,” he insisted, “I would say 80 percent of the things that I get held up and mocked for, I’m doing intentionally.”
He also pointed out that the band had delivered five world tours and recorded more than 200 songs, and asked, “So how dysfunctional were we, really?”