Soundgarden's Final Album With Chris Cornell Set for 2027
Guitarist Kim Thayil has given the clearest timeline yet: Soundgarden's last studio album arrives in 2027 and will carry previously recorded vocals from the late Chris Cornell, who died in 2017.
- Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil says the band's final studio album is coming in 2027.
- The record will feature previously recorded vocals from late singer Chris Cornell, who died in 2017.
- The album is expected to hold about nine songs, and the band has not ruled out a tour to mark its release.
- The project has been in the works since legal disputes with Cornell's heirs were resolved in 2023.
Nine years after his death, Chris Cornell’s voice will be heard again on a new Soundgarden album. Guitarist Kim Thayil has given the clearest timeline yet in interviews with music outlets: the band’s final studio record is due in 2027, built around vocal parts Cornell recorded before he was gone.
For a generation that grew up on Seattle and the grunge of the 1990s, this is more than an album announcement. It is a farewell that has been almost a decade in the making. Cornell died in May 2017, and Soundgarden has spent all these years sitting on material it did not know how to finish. Now, Thayil says, there is finally a plan and a date.
The album will hold about nine songs. It is not a long record, but every track carries weight because Cornell’s voice on it is the last thing he left the band. Thayil admitted openly that working with those recordings has not been easy. The band wants everything to be perfect, and perfection, when you are working with the voice of a friend who is no longer here, means months where nothing moves at all.
Why did the album have to wait almost ten years?
The answer is not in the music, it is in the courtroom. For years after Cornell’s death, Soundgarden was locked in legal disputes with the singer’s heirs over rights to the recordings and royalties. Until that was settled, no one could finish a single song. Only when the disputes ended in 2023 did the band gain the freedom to enter the studio and start assembling what Cornell had left behind.
Thayil explains that the ideas on the album are a shared work: his, bassist Ben Shepherd’s, drummer Matt Cameron’s and Cornell’s own. These are not demos pulled from a drawer and quickly polished. They are compositions the band worked on together, with vocals Cornell had already recorded, which the group is now carefully shaping into their final form.
What warms the hearts of longtime fans most is that the band has not ruled out a tour. The idea of Soundgarden stepping back onto a stage, with songs that carry Cornell’s voice, feels like something no one expected to see.
The last voice of an era
Chris Cornell was not just Soundgarden’s singer. He was one of the most recognizable voices in rock music, a man whose range made people stop in the middle of a song. Through Soundgarden, Audioslave and a solo career, he left behind songs that still fill arenas through other artists and playlists.
That is why this album is not an ordinary commercial release. It is the closing note on a story that began in Seattle more than four decades ago. The band that helped define an entire sound is now closing the circle with songs from its lost frontman.
Thayil was careful not to promise too much, but his words are the first concrete sign that the wait is nearing its end. If everything goes as planned, 2027 will bring something that seemed impossible: a new Soundgarden album, with Chris Cornell on the microphone.
Would you want to hear the last songs of an era, or should some voices be left to rest where they stopped?
