The Smashing Pumpkins unveil a new deep cut titled “Chrome Jets”

“Chrome Jets,” a previously unheard song from diamond-certified alternative rock band The Smashing Pumpkins, was recently made available digitally. The song is a b-side from the recording sessions for “Aghori Mhori Mei,” the group’s most recent album. Billy Corgan, the band’s leader and guitarist, had already discussed the song with Goldmine earlier this year.

There’s a song that’s not on the record; it’s a b-side. We’ve held it aside, and it’s called ‘Chrome Jets‘, and it’ll probably come out at some point. But we were working in Nashville, it was me, Jimmy and a local bass player, who was just jamming with us, and I wrote this riff for the song ‘Chrome Jets‘ because I was kind of musing on the Sunset Strip music from the mid-’80s. A lot of early hair metal had a lot to do with their interpretation of [’70s] glam. But it was a simplified version of glam; if you listen to Sweet in ’72 and some of the Sunset Strip bands in ’82, you can hear the connection. But it’s a simpler version, more metallic and a little heavier, but also not as complex. So, I was using that as a formula for maybe there being a way where we can kind of get back into earlier riff modality without over-intellectualizing what we do. Because that can be part of the problem, you start to over-intellectualize the riff if you’ve been around it for a while. Like, “What does the riff mean?” Sometimes, a riff is just a good riff. (laughs) And Tony Iommi is my absolute hero in that regard. Tony has a way of writing these riffs that seem bigger than the song. They sound like mountains to me; they just move in this celestial sphere. So, that song, ‘Chrome Jets‘, was really the watershed moment where I saw we could get back to making a primitive form of what we did. But more so based on our earlier thinking than trying to reverse engineer and pretend we can be 25 again. I know that’s way too convoluted, but honestly, that’s how it works.