Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	66/100
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
Chicago Sun-Times
Entertainment Weekly	C+
Los Angeles Times
NME	6/10
Pitchfork Media	4.2/10
Q
Rolling Stone
Spin	7/10
The Village Voice	C+

Machina/The Machines of God is the fifth studio album by the American alternative rock band The Smashing Pumpkins, released on February 29, 2000, by Virgin Records. A concept album, it marked the return of drummer Jimmy Chamberlin and was intended to be the band's final official LP release prior to their first break up in 2000. A sequel album — Machina II/The Friends & Enemies of Modern Music — was later released independently via the Internet, and limited quantities for the physical version.

As with its predecessor, Adore, Machina represented a drastic image and sound change for the band that failed to reconnect the band with chart-topping success. However, after the relatively brief Adore tour, the new line-up with Chamberlin and the former Hole bass guitarist Melissa Auf der Maur mounted longer international tours that returned the live incarnation of the band to a guitar-driven hard rock style.

A remastered and expanded version of the album was announced as a part of the band's project to reissue their back catalogue from 1991 to 2000, though Corgan announced in July 2015 that the release was tied up in legal issues with their record label.

After the Adore tour ended in the second half of 1998, lead singer/guitarist Billy Corgan immediately began to work on new material, playing new songs as early as October of that year. In the same month, the four original band members convened, and decided that Jimmy Chamberlin would rejoin the band, and that a final album and tour would be mounted before the group disbanded permanently. "If you want to know what Jimmy brings back to the band," Corgan told Q, "then listen to Adore and this new record back-to-back. It speaks for itself."

Corgan envisioned a lengthy concept album in conjunction with a musical theater approach to a tour, based around the idea of the band playing exaggerated versions of themselves, as the press and public seemed to view them. He later explained, "the band had become such cartoon characters at that point in the way we were portrayed in the media, the idea was that we would sort of go out and pretend we were the cartoon characters."

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Wikipedia