CYR

Cyr (stylized in all caps) is the eleventh studio album by American alternative rock band The Smashing Pumpkins. The album was released on November 27, 2020, by Sumerian Records, and is the second part in the band's Shiny and Oh So Bright series. Self-produced by vocalist and guitarist Billy Corgan, the album was preceded by the release of ten of its songs as singles.
Background and recording
After the band's previous album, Shiny and Oh So Bright, Vol. 1 / LP: No Past. No Future. No Sun. was released, the band toured in support of it, while at the time subtly talking about their upcoming recording efforts via Billy Corgan's Instagram stories. Drummer Jimmy Chamberlin notes that he and Corgan began planning the aesthetic of Cyr in early 2019, with Corgan sending him up to 35 potential song options: "It’s hard when you start with, like, 35 songs. Then you just whittle them down, except the criteria for the record was pretty high. Billy started sending me sketches of stuff he was thinking about, and we started talking about the drum sound."
In early 2020 Corgan confirmed that new album was in the process of being recorded, while going back and forth on how many songs would be on the album, starting with 23 songs, and eventually settling on just 20 to be released. Recording was finished early in the year, and had been taking place during 2019 and 2020, with Chamberlin noting, "Once we got a beat on what the record was gonna be, we had this pile of songs and they either translated that to that architecture or they didn’t, and that’s kind of  the 20 that we ended up with. They were the best of the best representation of that, ideologically."
Unlike the previous album, produced by Rick Rubin, Corgan self-produced Cyr, pushing himself to record and work outside his comfort zone: "I was trying to bring myself into modernity. I got Logic, I got some beats going, but I just wasn’t feeling it. I started to feel like the Luddite who couldn’t evolve. But then I realized that when I first heard Siouxsie and the Banshees, Sisters of Mercy and Joy Division, they were making very modern music by using the technology that they had at hand. So I had to get inside the choices that they made." The band members recorded parts on their typical instruments, with synthesizers being recorded by Corgan and backing vocals by Sierra Swan and touring member Katie Cole. Chamberlin notes that the sound of his drums on the album were influenced by "early-seventies prog rock bands, that type of tight dry drum sound."