The Smashing Pumpkins will bring their newly announced Rats In A Cage Tour to Montreal’s Bell Centre on October 9, with tickets going on sale May 21 at 10 a.m. through evenko.ca The North American run starts September 30 in Columbus and centres on the 30th anniversary of Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness, still the record that defines the band’s strange position between arena rock excess and alternative isolation.
Billy Corgan says the show will split into two distinct sets. The first focuses entirely on Mellon Collie material in what he describes as a “highly theatrical setting.” The second pulls from across the band’s catalogue, from Gish through 2024’s Aghori Mhori Mei. For a group that spent years resisting nostalgia while simultaneously living inside the shadow of the mid-’90s, it is a fairly direct acknowledgement of where the centre of gravity still sits.
The band spent the past week teasing the tour with a staged “funeral” for Zero, the black-shirted avatar Corgan introduced during the Mellon Collie era. Around 300 people attended the event at Hollywood Legion Theater in Los Angeles. It was half performance art, half fan-service ritual, which has increasingly become the Pumpkins’ preferred mode whenever revisiting their imperial phase.
Montreal gets the only Quebec date on the tour, arriving two days after a stop in Hamilton and before the band heads west toward Chicago. Arena tours built around complete-album nostalgia have become standard industry practice over the past decade, but Mellon Collie remains unusually durable because the record itself was already bloated, theatrical, contradictory, and self-mythologizing. Most double albums from that era now feel trapped in their runtime. This one still behaves like a world people willingly disappear into for two hours.
The tour lands after a busy stretch for the band and for Corgan specifically. The Smashing Pumpkins spent 2025 reissuing Mellon Collie material, staging orchestral reinterpretations with the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and continuing the relentless late-period productivity that has defined the band since reuniting. Outside the group, Corgan has kept one foot in podcasting and another in professional wrestling through his role with the National Wrestling Alliance, which recently secured a broadcast deal with Comet TV.
Before the tour begins, the band will headline Lollapalooza for the first time since 1994. Thirty years later, they are still circling the same questions about legacy, spectacle, and control, just with bigger screens and better lighting.
Photo Credit: Tyler Curtis
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