Drummer Matt Cameron has revealed that Soundgarden‘s final album is currently being mixed. The eight-song LP contains vocals recorded by late singer Chris Cornell before his 2017 passing.
Cameron discussed the album’s status with Dean Delray on the Let There Be Talk podcast, noting that it’s being mixed by Joe Barresi, who did the same for the band’s last album, 2012’s King Animal.
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“Well, we don’t really have a [release] date yet,” said Cameron (as transcribed by Blabbermouth). “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. We’re just taking it one step at a time ’cause it’s been kind of a long process just to get to here.”
Asked about the number of tracks expected for the release, Cameron responded, “Eight songs. I think that that’s pretty much all there is with vocals. We had some instrumentals left over that [guitarist] Kim [Thayil] wants work on. So maybe we’ll do some new stuff together, which would be fine by me.”
This follows previous updates on the long-gestating album, with Cameron breaking down the progress over the past decade-plus. “We’d been sending demos back and forth since, like, 2013, ’14, something like that,” the drummer told Delray. “I would send Chris some stuff. He would rearrange it, make a song out of it… I sent him three tracks, and then he would sing on top of the instrumentals that I’d written and rearrange them and everything. 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.”
He added, “We recorded all the rehearsals and everything. And we did start writing a bunch of stuff together. But the stuff we’re working on now was from when… We are using some of the live rehearsal stuff, like some of the guitar stuff that Chris played guitar on, and then we’re using the vocals from these demos that he put together, with the music that we had written together. And, yeah, just kind of building on top of that.”
Late last year, Soundgarden revealed that they were finishing the recording process with producer Terry Date, who previously worked on Louder Than Love and Badmotorfinger. Prior to that, the surviving members had been in a legal battle with Cornell’s widow Vicky over the recordings, before coming to a reconciliation in 2023.
Watch Matt Cameron’s full appearance on the Let There Be Talk podcast below.
