Pearl Jam have started writing material for 12th album

Pearl Jam
(Image credit: Danny Clinch)

Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard says the band have made a "good start" on the follow-up to 2020's Gigaton.

Gossard says the band are enjoying a well-earned rest, having completed a series of rescheduled tour dates that were affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. But, he says, they will soon get to work on polishing up some ideas for what will be their 12th album.

He tells Riff TV: "The plan is that we're gonna do some more recording, and we're gonna try to finish a record here pretty soon. There's songs that are getting close to being done and there's a bunch that aren't. And we're gonna do something here pretty soon.

"We've got demos for days. Everybody writes in the band, so now it's really just trying to figure out what's something different for us and what's something exciting. And we're working on that. I think we've got a good start on another record that will be hopefully good.

"I bet it's gonna be 2024 before the record comes out, is my guess. But we're working on it."

Gossard also revealed that he has no problem with Pearl Jam's music being described as "grunge." While some bands tagged as grunge tended to shy away from the term, Gossard says it did a pretty good job of describing the sound.

He says: "Oh I don't care, you can call it grunge. Grunge makes sense, it sort of describes it in the right way. It's a little bit broken."

Pearl Jam's second album Vs. recently featured in Classic Rock's Album of the Week Club.

Stef wrote close to 5,000 stories during his time as assistant online news editor and later as online news editor between 2014-2016. An accomplished reporter and journalist, Stef has written extensively for a number of UK newspapers and also played bass with UK rock favourites Logan. His favourite bands are Pixies and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Stef left the world of rock'n'roll news behind when he moved to his beloved Canada in 2016, but he started on his next 5000 stories in 2022.