The Smashing Pumpkins released ATUM: Act One digitally on November 15, 2022. Its 11 songs opened ATUM: A Rock Opera in Three Acts, a 33-song project conceived as a continuation of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and Machina/The Machines of God. The band was returning to a story that stretched across two earlier albums, with an exiled musician at its center.
The opening instrumental, “ATUM,” establishes the space setting for Shiny, a rock star whose influence has faded but who still troubles the authorities. Explaining the plot to NPR’s Weekend Edition in May 2023, Billy Corgan described a character offered a spacecraft for one instead of a prison cell. Shiny is sent away to spend the rest of his life in isolation. June, a devoted fan he doesn’t know, uses her family’s wealth to place herself nearby in space. “Butterfly Suite,” the second song, gives her a voice: Corgan described it as a daily expression of love shaped by old Hollywood musicals. Her routine is shattered when Shiny sets his craft on a course toward the sun.
Listeners had already encountered the wider project through “Beguiled,” released as the lead single in September 2022. That song belonged to Act Two, so it wasn’t among the November installment’s 11 tracks. Act One introduced the opening stretch of the narrative, concluding with “The Gold Mask.”
Corgan supplied a running guide through Thirty-Three with William Patrick Corgan, the podcast launched with iHeartRadio in September 2022. Episodes introduced new music alongside discussion of the band’s history, older songs and guest conversations. The first two featured “ATUM” and “Butterfly Suite,” allowing listeners to hear the beginning of the work before the first act reached streaming services. The podcast gave Corgan room to explain the characters and the connections between the new material and the earlier records.
The project had been developing for years, and the pandemic’s interruption of touring gave Corgan time to pursue it. He told Kerrang! in September 2022 that the work had occupied roughly two continuous years, including additional music intended for the box set. Some of that work overlapped with CYR. Across the main album, he wanted a balance between heavy material, music closer to the band’s electronic direction and pieces driven by the musical’s theatrical requirements. “I was determined to not overly do anything,” he said.
The three-part release also addressed a practical problem. Corgan wanted people who heard a new song on the podcast to be able to find it outside the show without waiting months. He acknowledged that the resulting streaming schedule wasn’t exactly what he had originally intended, but he also worried that individual songs would disappear inside a single 33-track release. Spacing out the acts gave listeners time with smaller portions of the work while the podcast continued through the story.
ATUM: Act Two followed on January 31, 2023. The final act and the complete ATUM arrived on May 5, 2023, bringing the three installments together as the band’s twelfth studio album.
