Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan launched a tirade against his nineties contemporaries Pearl Jam and Foo Fighters, claiming that he “can out-write” both of them.

Talking during a radio interview on ‘The Howard Stern Show’, Corgan dismissed grunge titans Pearl Jam as “derivative”, claiming that it’s a “mystery” to him how they have managed to keep up their status as a huge arena-filling band “because I just don’t get it”.

Billy Corgan
Billy Corgan criticised his '90s contemporaries Pearl Jam and Foo Fighters in a radio interview

Describing the Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana as in a league of their own during the American alternative rock dominance of the early nineties, he went on to say "I think if you stack my songs up, Cobain's songs up, and that band's songs, they just don’t have the songs.”

Furthermore, Corgan took a snipe at Dave Grohl’s Foo Fighters, claiming that they had barely evolved as a band and are nowhere near the standard set by Nirvana, for whom Grohl was the drummer. "Dave is a great musician, a great songwriter and has done the work but to me, my criticism of the Foo Fighters, if I’m being a music critic, is that they just haven’t evolved and that’s sort of the recent wrap on them is, you know, making the same music.”

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A few days before, the Pumpkins singer told Time Out how most of his generation of songwriters were running on borrowed time and had little left to offer creatively. “I feel I could take the same position I’ve always taken: I can out-write all of them and I’ll do so until the day I die."

Corgan, 47, is promoting the new Smashing Pumpkins album Monuments to an Elegy, released on Monday (8th December). It is the second instalment in a three part album series with the wider title Teargarden by Kaleidyscope. The third album, with the working title Day For Night, is due to be released in 2015 and is rumoured to be the group’s last.