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The Smashing Pumpkins wrote and recorded a Christmas album during COVID, according to returning drummer Jimmy Chamberlin.

• READ MORE: The Smashing Pumpkins – ‘ATUM’ review: bombastic space-rock opera with anthems

Speaking to SiriusFX, Chamberlain revealed that he’d worked alongside vocalist Billy Corgan throughout the pandemic.

“I have a studio at my house, Billy has a studio at his house. We live 20 minutes away. We’re not neighbours, but we’re really close to each other. We can get to each other’s houses very quickly,” he said [via Consequence].

The pair ended up recording “close to 80 songs” over the pandemic.

As well as 2020’s ‘Cyr’ and the recently-released ‘ATUM’, the pair got around to recording a “psychedelic record that we had on a back burner that we never got to” alongside “a Christmas record”.

He went on to call the experience “great” because “you don’t get those big blocks of time anymore”.

“You’re always either on tour, you’re doing stuff like [promo]. You’re being pulled in a million different directions. We figured out that [COVID] could be the only point in time where we have a year or even two years to just simply create music without any logistic constraints on the process,” he said.

Earlier this week Corgan revealed that he’d paid a hacker to stop them releasing new Smashing Pumpkins music, with the FBI even getting involved.

“They had other stuff from other artists as well,” Corgan said. “They had stuff that was shocking to me, classic stuff from bands of the past probably doing reissues. I don’t think any of that stuff has been leaked out, so whatever happened, it all got shut down.”

While the band haven’t mentioned a release date for either the Christmas album or the psychedelic one, Corgan has revealed that he’s already working on the band’s 13th album.

Speaking to Kerrang! Radio, he said: “We are already in the studio working on the follow up to ‘Atum’, which I’m happy to say is a straight up rock and roll guitar record,” before comparing it to 1993’s ‘Siamese Dream’ and 1995’s ‘Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness’.

“We’re hoping to make it just a single record. It definitely won’t be a double record. I don’t want to do that again,” Corgan said.

The post The Smashing Pumpkins recorded a Christmas album during COVID appeared first on NME.