"Being Beige," the first finished track off the Smashing Pumpkins' forthcoming Monuments to an Elegy, has a simple title but its acoustic guitar and drum machine intro builds toward an urgent, memorable chorus, where singer Billy Corgan repeats the line, "The world's on fire" as the full band fills out the previously sparse tune.
"People always ask me to explain songs, and honestly I can't," Corgan. "But if there's honesty in this lyric, it's that there's something amiss in our cosmos. Yet still, we must love."
Monuments, due December 9th, will continue Teargarden by Kaleidyscope, the super-album that began with 2010's Songs for a Sailor and will conclude with 2015's Day for Night. The last installment, Oceania, was included in 50 Best Albums of 2012 and described as "the finest slab of cosmic prog [Corgan] has thrown down since the Pumpkins' early-Nineties heyday."
