It looks like the saga of Soundgarden’s final album might be approaching its conclusion. Drummer Matt Cameron has revealed that the mixing is being done at the moment.
Cameron was appearing on the Let There Be Talk podcast with Dean Dalray and confirmed that “we’re just gonna try to get this thing mixed, get it over the finish line, and then hopefully we’ll have a better idea what’s gonna come next.” Apparently Joe Barresi, who has worked with Avenged Sevenfold, Queens Of The Stone Age and Bad Religion, is working the desk.
It’s just eight songs long: “That’s pretty much all there is with vocals. We have some instrumentals left over that [guitarist] Kim Thayil wants to work on. So maybe we’ll do some new stuff together, which would be fine by me.”
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There is no confirmed release date for the album as yet. The drummer said that the surviving members of the band were “just taking it one step at a time ’cause it’s been kind of a long process just to get to here.”
That’s something of an understatement. The album – which has yet to acquire a title – started off from demos the band made around 2013/14 with Chris Cornell. “I sent him three tracks, and then he would sing on top of the instrumentals that I’d written and rearrange them and everything,” Cameron remembers. “And then we started getting together in, like, 2015, ’16 at a couple of different studios, so we were preparing to make another album before that last tour in 2017.”
Everything changed after Cornell died in May 2017. Those tracks became tangled up in a long legal battle between the remaining band members and Cornell’s widow, Vicky, regarding unpaid royalties and the rights to the unreleased material.
That was settled in 2023. Three years on, it seems the finished album is finally nearing completion. “I’m really looking forward to getting it done and putting it out there,” says Cameron. “And I’m hoping the reaction won’t be too intense for people, but I know that it will be because it has been for us.
“But I think at this stage of the game, we’ve been listening to it so much that I think we’ve built a little bit of a callus up to the emotional side of it, and we’re just trying to get all the tracks. And it sounds like Soundgarden.”
