Background
The Smashing Pumpkins had cemented their place as a cultural force with the multi-platinum Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Already sensing the limits of their guitar-driven hard rock sound, the band had started to branch out during the making of Mellon Collie, and, after the chart-topping success of the electronic-leaning "1979", the band zeroed in on electronica.
As the sprawling and massively successful Infinite Sadness tour wound down, Billy Corgan found himself facing many difficult issues, including musical burnout, the absence of his "best friend and musical soul mate in the band" Jimmy Chamberlin, the end of his marriage, and the death of his mother to cancer.
In this period, the band released two new singles on movie soundtracks—"Eye" and "The End Is the Beginning Is the End". Both songs incorporated electronic elements, yet retained the hard rock elements of the band's previous material; one reviewer called the two singles "balls-out, full-energy chargers" and wrote off the Pumpkins' previous remarks that the upcoming album would "rock" less.
However, the new album material Corgan was writing consisted mainly of simple acoustic songs. Corgan, James Iha, D'arcy Wretzky, and Matt Walker spent a few days in the studio in February 1997 laying down demos mostly as live takes, and the band hoped to quickly record an entire album in such a manner. Corgan, hoping to maintain the band's progressive rock-inspired experimentation, soon had second thoughts about this approach and began envisioning a hybrid of folk rock and electronica that was at once "ancient" and "futuristic".
Read more about this topic: Adore (The Smashing Pumpkins album)
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