Smashing Pumpkins To Announce New Album Details At SXSW 2012

More details are surfacing about Smashing Pumpkins’ long-awaited new album, ‘Oceania.’ Frontman Billy Corgan will reveal specifics about the full-length—including its release date and the scope of the project—during the interactive portion of the South By Southwest 2012 festival, which takes place from March 9-13 in Austin, Texas.

Unsurprisingly, his plans for the album appear forward-thinking. “Our aim is to turn the ‘social’ into a new way to experience an album,” Corgan told Mashable. “By taking the medium one step further, we will create an experience with ‘Oceania’ online and off-line that transcends the single and the single mentality in all ways.

“You’re going to take the record a have a full online experience with it,” he added.

While the 44-year-old was mum on further details for now, he did promise ‘Oceania’ will resurrect “the album experience through fan engagement in a whole new way.”

The record, the band’s first since 2007’s ‘Zeitgeist,’ is considered part of Smashing Pumpkins’ massive, ongoing ‘Teargarden by Kaleidyscope’ project. Since being announced in 2009, the release has evolved slightly: Originally, Corgan said ‘Teargarden’ would have 44 songs, all of which the band planned to release online, for free, one at a time.

So far, however, the project has yielded just twelve songs—and it hasn’t quite been as successful as Corgan had hoped.

"I reached a point where I saw that the one-song-at-a-time idea had maxed itself out," he told Billboard.com in September 2011. "I just saw we weren't getting the penetration in to everybody that I would have hoped.

"I mean, we have 1.3 million followers on our Facebook page, right? So you think you put [a song] up and 1.3 million people are gonna see it -- but only if they're looking at the exact moment it goes up. They're not necessarily searching and they're friends aren't necessarily going to tell them about it. It's very mercurial.

"I just saw that we weren't reaching the sort of casual person who still gets their information from traditional sources. So I thought, 'What do I need to do?' and then I thought, 'OK, I'll go back to making an album.' "