Soundgarden: the final album with Chris Cornell is on the way

Soundgarden drummer Matt Cameron has revealed that work on the final album recorded with Chris Cornell is now in its closing stages. The record, long stalled by a complicated legal dispute, has entered the mixing phase, the last step before release, although no release date has been announced yet.
Speaking on the Let There Be Talk podcast, the drummer explained that the band's goal is to finally complete the project: "We're trying to mix this record and get it across the finish line. Then we'll have a clearer idea of what happens next. We're taking it one step at a time, because it's been a very long process."

According to Cameron, the album will feature eight tracks with Chris Cornell's vocals, recorded before the singer's death in 2017. "I believe that's all the vocal recordings we have," he said. There are also a few instrumental tracks that guitarist Kim Thayil would like to keep working on. "We might even end up making something new together, and that would be totally fine with me," he added.
The project had been stalled for years by the legal dispute between the band members and Cornell's estate, which was resolved in 2023. Since then, Soundgarden have gone back to working on the material, periodically updating fans on their progress. The start of mixing now represents the clearest sign yet that the long-awaited posthumous album is finally nearing release.

The album grew out of Soundgarden's final years of activity. The band had actually started working on a new record before Chris Cornell's death in May 2017, but the project remained frozen for a long time due to the legal dispute between the surviving members of the group and Vicky Cornell, the singer's widow and the administrator of his estate.
At the heart of the dispute were recordings made between 2015 and early 2017. According to Vicky Cornell, this was material her husband had recorded personally in his home studio in Florida; the band, on the other hand, has always maintained that those songs were conceived as the new Soundgarden album and developed collectively between Seattle and New York.
The dispute centered on seven songs — "Cancer," "Stone Age Mind," "Road Less Traveled," "Orphans," "At Ophians Door," "Ahead Of The Dog" and "Merrmas" — all credited to Cornell, in some cases as sole author.
The turning point came in April 2023, when the parties reached an out-of-court settlement that allowed Soundgarden to regain access to the recordings and resume work on the album. The following year, Vicky Cornell disputed the financial valuation of the share owed to her husband's estate, but no further developments have emerged since then.

In 2024, Kim Thayil, Matt Cameron and Ben Shepherd also reunited on stage for a charity concert in Seattle, joined by singer Shaina Shepherd. On that occasion they performed some classics from the band's catalogue, including "Flower" and "Beyond the Wheel," from "Ultramega OK," and "Outshined," from "Badmotorfinger."
Today, with mixing now underway and the eight tracks featuring Chris Cornell's voice practically finished, the release of Soundgarden's final album finally seems within reach. All that remains to be known is the release date of a record fans have been waiting almost a decade for.

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