I discovered The Smashing Pumpkins my freshman year of high school. It was perfect timing. I had always carried this strange feeling around with me like a sad, yet blissful nostalgia. Nostalgia for a time that I didn’t really know. When I first heard this album, I connected with it so deeply because it perfectly captured this feeling. It was the most beautiful, psychedelic, and enraged piece of art my ears had ever witnessed. I was hooked. The song X.Y.U. stole my heart from the moment I heard it, and to this day I have heard nothing like it. The whole album is so raw and powerful, not to mention the album art is incredibly immersive. The Tonight, Tonight music video is still the most dope I have ever seen, and I resonate with it so deeply. I  have never resonated more with a particular aesthetic in my life. Smashing Pumpkins, you were the soundtrack to my coming of age, to my wonderful and terrible discoveries about life and love…to car and train and plane rides that seemed to go on forever. I have more memories with you than I can count, and I want to thank you for giving me hope in a time of my life that seemed hopeless. Hearing the lyric, “Intoxicated with the madness/ I’m in love with my sadness” when I was 14 or 15 is when I first realized what having depression truly meant, and subsequently helped me cope with what I was feeling. There will never be another band with the same sense of phantasmagoria as The Smashing Pumpkins. Whenever I want to connect to that inexplicable feeling deep inside myself, I listen to this album. I will forever cherish your brilliance <3