Billy Corgan, fresh off releasing a so-so Smashing Pumpkins album, recently said some wholly true things about Lil Peep‘s ability to tap into the same angst he felt as a young Metallica fan.
“They unleashed this set of emotions in the suburban underground of this sort of angst of, like, where are we going?” Corgan, speaking on a recent episode of the BUILD series, said of being turned on to Metallica in the late ’80s. “Like, what is the suburban dream that all of our parents were promised? It was empty. It’s more of a nihilist kind of an opinion than anything sort of intellectual or erudite.”
Asked if this sort of suburban-angst-channeling was, in his opinion, present in music today, Corgan very wisely singled out the late Peep as the perfect example of why the answer to that question is a firm yes.
“I think, unfortunately, Lil Peep,” Corgan said. “I think Lil Peep, probably, of all the artists that I’ve heard recently tapped into that same angst and it’s so sad he passed away because he was just getting to the bigger part of his work, you know? He somehow, when I heard Lil Peep I was like ‘That’s exactly that same vibe!’ It’s like I’m at the 7-Eleven and I have all these deep feelings and thoughts and the 7-Eleven is the epicenter of my universe. For a lot of people, that is their life.”
You can catch the full Corgan chat, full of plenty of reliable Corganisms on other topics like Nirvana and Killing Joke, above. The Peep talk starts around the 14-minute mark.
Corgan isn’t the first to make a Metallica comparison with regards to the sonic universe Peep put into motion with his brief but no less influential discography. Critics, particularly when writing about the posthumously released Come Over When You’re Sober Pt. 2, have put forth similar ideas in recent weeks. Peep, of course, was widely known for pulling from a dense variety of mainstream rock and slightly-less-mainstream sub-genres dating all the way back to his sampling of everyone from blink-182 to Mineral during his mixtape era.
