There are at least two songs on the last Soundgarden album where Kim Thayil wrote the music first and sent it to Chris Cornell, who then rebuilt the structure around his own lyrics. Verse lengths moved. Choruses moved. Then the whole thing had to move again to accommodate the guitar solo.
Thayil described that process to Ultimate Guitar this summer, and it is the clearest account yet of what the surviving band are actually working with. The album is now expected in 2027, and he put the likely length at “about eight or nine songs. More likely nine.”
Nine Songs, Probably
The number is not fixed because the record is not finished. “We’re looking at the material that we intend to complete, and we also look at material that perhaps we can complete,” Thayil said, with the final calls to be made between himself, drummer Matt Cameron, bassist Ben Shepherd and the producer.
The pace is set by everything else. “We have to book studio time here and there,” he said. “And it’s been a very busy year for us with the Hall of Fame induction, very busy year for me with the book, until last year it was very busy for Matt with Pearl Jam recordings and Pearl Jam touring… we kind of have to work around a lot of that.”
That is a familiar shape for a band of this vintage, and it is why “aiming for next year” is stated as a target rather than a date. Other bands solve it the same way, recording in the gaps, as Elder did with Through Zero between tours in Berlin.
What Cornell Left, and How It Works
The material dates from sessions the four of them had been building before Cornell’s death in 2017, and Thayil is careful about how he frames the authorship.
“These are ideas that were created by Matt, by Ben, by myself and by Chris,” he said. “These are songs we’ve worked with in a collaborative fashion amongst all four of us in different combinations over the years.”
That matters for what the record will be. This is not a vocal archive being dressed with new instrumentation; it is a set of four-way collaborations, some of which began as Thayil’s music with Cornell’s lyrics written onto it, and some the other way around. The band have found it hard going precisely because they are trying to finish the arrangements the way the four of them would have.
Thayil set out the mechanics of one of those collaborations in some detail. “There are at least two songs that I wrote the music for,” he said. “One of them, I wrote the lyrics for. One of the collaborations would have been that I submitted music to Chris, and he wrote lyrics for them.”
What happened next is the part that makes the material difficult to finish without him. “He would move the verse and chorus lengths and sequences to accommodate his lyrics,” Thayil said. “But then, they themselves had to accommodate the dynamic of the instrumental. Sometimes, lengths will increase to accommodate guitar solos.”
In other words the structures were negotiated in both directions, and repeatedly. A bar count in these songs is not a neutral container. It is the residue of an argument between a lyric and a solo that two people used to settle between them, and one of them is not there to settle it.
Why It Took This Long
The delay was never only creative. The recordings sat in limbo through a dispute between the band and Cornell’s estate, handled by his widow Vicky Cornell. An agreement to allow the release of new music was announced in 2023, though Cameron said later that year that plans were still on hold.
The settlement did more than unlock the album. It also released a backlog of catalogue work the band had simply stopped touching.
The Catalogue Is Moving Again
Thayil has said the band are “starting work on addressing the catalog and the anniversary issue”, with 2026 marking thirty years since Down on the Upside and a reissue under consideration.
The more interesting one is older. “We pretty much had an anniversary box for Louder Than Love in the can with Hiro [Yamamoto] and then some live stuff we had done with Jason [Everman] at the time and some demo stuff,” he said. “So it was kind of ready to go and again, you know, some stuff was put on hold for a period of years and we’ll revisit it.”
A finished box set for the 1989 album, with the original bassist and live recordings from the brief Everman period, has therefore been sitting complete and unreleased. That is a very specific casualty of the legal years: not a project abandoned, but one assembled and then frozen.
Anniversary reissues are the standard way a heritage catalogue stays in circulation, and they work when the material is real rather than repackaged, in the way Strong Persuader turning forty kept Robert Cray touring.
The Hall of Fame Year
The other thing that ate 2025 was the induction. Soundgarden entered the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame that year, and the ceremony in November produced the closest thing to a full reunion the band have managed.
Cameron, Thayil and Shepherd played alongside Alice in Chains guitarist Jerry Cantrell and Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready, with Taylor Momsen and Brandi Carlile handling vocals. Hiro Yamamoto, the original bassist, joined them.
“Thank you for guiding us into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame,” the band wrote afterwards. “We felt your affection during the induction ceremony and it made us proud.” On the second of January they added, simply, that there was “more to come in 2026”.
Read against Thayil’s timeline, that tease points at the catalogue rather than the album.
Whether They Tour It
Thayil did not rule out touring behind the record, but he was noticeably unresolved about how.
Asked about going out with a guest vocalist, or several, he said only: “That would be discussed roughly, generally, like, ‘Well, what do we do? How do we promote it?'” The Hall of Fame performance is the working model, since it put five different singers and players around the same songs without anyone being asked to replace Cornell.
Why the Last One Is Hard
Thayil is direct about the pressure, and about where it comes from.
Interest in the album is “probably heightened” by its circumstances, he acknowledged, before adding: “we know the significance of this material, with our legacy and with Chris’ legacy… we want to make sure that it’s as great as it can be, and because it’ll be the last studio album.”
That is the honest reason a record announced years ago is still moving. Nine songs is not a long album, and the band have had the material for the better part of a decade. What they have not had is a version of it they were willing to put out under a name that now closes a catalogue.
Nothing about the 2027 date should be treated as firm. It is a band working in booked studio hours around a Hall of Fame year, a book, and another group’s touring schedule, on a record where the person whose voice defines it cannot be consulted about any of the remaining decisions.
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