Earlier this year, Peal Jam released their first new song in five years, prompting rumours of a new record. Now, with the new album confirmed, bassist Jeff Ament has revealed that the group has lots of music “party written” for the forthcoming record.
In March, Pearl Jam unleashed their latest tune ‘Can’t Deny Me’, a protest song inspired by the presidency of Donald Trump. However, one of the most exciting aspects of this new track was the fact that the tune is set to be released on their as-yet-untitled eleventh studio album.
Now, bassist Jeff Ament has revealed that the group has lots of ideas for their new record, though the vast majority of it is still in the writing stages.
Speaking to Jeff Sweatman for US radio station 106.1 The Corner (via Blabbermouth), Ament offered as much of an update for the record as he could. “We have a bunch of stuff that’s sort of partly written. Unfortunately, we have rehearsals coming up for Europe and the shows this summer, so it’s in a little bit of a limbo state right now,” he explained.
“We still need to record it; we haven’t really recorded anything. But [there are] a lot of ideas.”
“We’ve sort of been telling ourselves that we weren’t gonna put a ton of pressure on the situation,” Ament continued. “We really wanna make something great, and we wanna have the freedom to live with some of these ideas for a while and then maybe record them in a different way. We’re sort of exploring all sorts of different things right now. So I think it bodes well for whatever the next album is.”
Of course, this news comes just one week after Jeff Ament appeared on the Kyle Meredith With… podcast to reveal that the band are currently eyeing 2019 as the most probable release date for their new album.
Ament explained that the band needs “a good solid six to eight weeks carved out where we’re just recording all these ideas that we have.”
“The one thing we have working against us is the upcoming tour, the other thing we have working against us is it takes three or four months to do a vinyl version of any record,” he explained, but noted that “2019 is probably safe to say” in regards to a release date for the new album.
While Pearl Jam probably won’t have any music on the horizon for quite a few months at this stage, this of course means we can try focusing our attention on getting the band back down to Australia for a series of shows – their first since the 2014 Big Day Out festival.
Of course, we’d also rather they worked on the new record before they touched down on Aussie shores, so maybe we should give them a bit of breathing room so they can bring a new album with them when they make their triumphant return.