“Bullet” featured distorted guitars and screams from frontman Billy Corgan. It became Smashing Pumpkins’ first Top 40 hit, peaking at No. 22 on the Billboard Hot 100 in January 1996, and won the band a Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance. Thirty years later, it remains the band’s second-highest top-charting song, bested only by “1979” from the same album.
“[With] Mellon Collie, you know, there was a sort of planned idea for singles, but ‘Bullet with Butterfly Wings’ came out first,” he told the outlet. “I fought it, and kind of eventually gave in.”
Corgan previously explained that he was surprised when a Virgin Records executive insisted on releasing “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” as a single.
Decades after releasing the career-defining hit, Corgan noted that fans still reference him via the song’s lyric, “Despite all the rage, I am still just a rat in a cage.”
Sticking to that theme, in fall 2026, Corgan and the Smashing Pumpkins will hit the road for The Rats in a Cage Tour to celebrate 30 years of Mellon Collie and Infinite Sadness.
Related: 1993 One-Hit Wonder Became an Era-Defining Classic, Despite Never Hitting No. 1
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