MINNEAPOLIS — Smashing Pumpkins played two sets clocking in at a total of nearly three hours Tuesday night in St. Paul. And yet the band made its point within the first seven minutes.

“Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage,” front man Billy Corgan sang in the second song, “Bullet with Butterfly Wings.”

That iconic line provided the name of the Chicago rock group’s current U.S. trek, the Rats in a Cage Tour. It also set the tone for too much of what was to come in the first half of Tuesday’s show: overwrought, sometimes melodramatic, generically angry music — as heard on the band’s most epic and teen-angsty album, the double-LP “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness,” whose 30th anniversary is the raison d’être for this tour.

At 59, Corgan seemed a bit too matured and wised-up maybe even content to be singing a lot of those “Mellon Collie” tunes. It wasn’t just him, though. Downtrodden songs like “Zero” and “An Ode to No One” don’t exactly ring authentic when the crowd of around 11,000 fans is largely comprised of middle-aged men buying up $50 “Zero”-emblazoned T-shirts and $18 beers.

Good thing the Pumpkins only played about half of that not-so-timeless double-album and only based half of Tuesday’s performance on it. Here’s how it all played out.

The “Mellon Collie” half: They performed 16 songs off the record starting with two of its three biggest singles: the record’s most timeless ode to youth, “1979,” whose light boppiness rather clumsily bumped up against the fiery ire of “Bullet with Butterfly Wings.”

Among the lesser-played LP cuts, a lot of the prettier and, yep, more melancholy songs came off beautifully, including the megahit “Tonight, Tonight” as well as “Thirty-Three.” Faster and more furious songs like “Bodies” and “Zero,” though, felt forced and at times cringey with lines like, “Love is suicide,” and, “God is empty just like me.”

The “everything else” half: Offsetting the oldies mold of the first set, the band started off the second half making a case for the more recent songs “Machina, Machina,” “Sojourner,” “Pentagrams” and (best of all) “Edin,” the latter building into a feedback-drenched epic.

Fans were clearly losing interest, though, so much so that the 1993 classic “Disarm” was greeted like “Free Bird” at a Skynyrd show. That was the first of four welcomed off the “Siamese Dream” album, including “Today,” “Cherub Rock” and “Mayonaise.” They ignored their debut record, “Gish,” but offered a 1991-era outtake, “Jesus Is the Sun,” before closing with another messianically named number, the 2008 blaster “Superchrist.”

Billy Corgan’s input: Wearing his now-standard medieval-monk attire with a long skirt — he changed it up from all-black to all-white between sets — the front man was in strong voice, especially in the more dramatic and demanding numbers such as “Disarm.” He also came off a lot more affable and relatable than during a lot of the first 30 years of his band’s career, even often looking like he was having fun.

Corgan actually made light of how far-removed he is from a lot of the “Mellon Collie” songs.

“I used to be an angry young man, and now I’m just an angry, old man,” he said with a chuckle before the especially surly “Here Is No Why.”

Everyone else’s input: As has been the case since original guitarist James Iha rejoined in 2018 — and especially with the 2024 addition of energetic and impactful third multi-instrumentalist and co-vocalist Kiki Wong — the Pumpkins as a unit sounded revitalized and rock-solid. They played many of the old tunes with more precision and gusto than the original lineup often did, including a lot of the deeper cuts added for this tour.

One of the unexpected heavier highlights in the first half, the playfully thrashy “Jellybelly,” was a reminder of drummer Jimmy Chamberlin’s invaluable contributions, as was his heavy hammering in “Cherub Rock.”

The night’s best bit of nostalgia: Chamberlin also shared the night’s best stage banter, offering a story about when the band drove overnight from Grinnell College in Iowa in 1990 to open for Thee Hypnotics at the tiny 7th St. Entry in Minneapolis.

“We risked our lives with our sound man driving our van all the way, and we were dead tired,” he remembered. “And we played literally one of the most amazing shows of the band’s entire career.”

Suggested new T-shirt slogan for the band’s next tour: “Smashing Pumpkins: Four decades of making the best of the worst times.”

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