Pearl Jam's new album ”Dark Matter” ! Single out!

kmcmanus said:

30+ years deep, the fanbase is still excited at the idea of new music before they hear it. A lot of bands would love to have that “major problem”. I can’t speak for anyone else but I’ve liked or loved every album. Odds are pretty good I’ll like this one too.

Same

igotid88 said:

kmcmanus said:

30+ years deep, the fanbase is still excited at the idea of new music before they hear it. A lot of bands would love to have that “major problem”. I can’t speak for anyone else but I’ve liked or loved every album. Odds are pretty good I’ll like this one too.

Same

Ditto

Tim Simmons said:

We should probably wait to hear anything before expectations are set. This seems to be a major problem in this community.

My expectations are always high for Pearl Jam. Not any higher for this one but I like hearing the things Mike said as those are three things I have been wanting them to do 🤷🏼‍♂️

I’m not saying don’t be excited for new tunes, I’m saying don’t hang your hat on Mike claiming it sounds like early material. Maybe it does and that would be great. But if it doesn’t, that’s 572 threads claiming that Mike lied to us all because they took him at his word hyping a new record, and didn’t hear a second of new music. 

One thing is for sure. Opinions and discussion of new music has no effect on its quality or reception. 

dwjmu84 said:

One thing is for sure. Opinions and discussion of new music has no effect on its quality or reception. 

Having said that, I’m with Jeff: “how can you judge art?”

We’re welcoming a daughter in March (first kid). I’m sure this collection of tracks will be very special to me years from now. 

Congrats! That's very exciting indeed. I have two boys (7 & 4) and it's wild how certain music that came out around their births has a permanent residence in my soul. I can remember exact moments I heard songs for the very first time because of their association with that time. I'm sure this new record will hold a similar space for you. Just make sure you allow room in your soul for these guitar solos.

Reach Down is one of my all time favorite songs.  Something along those lines would be great.  

The get in/get out, write the whole thing right then and use as few as takes as possible is a great approach. Probably as close to the raw approach of the vs/Vit/No Code as possible. 

I've never been disappointed by a Pearl Jam album, so I have no reason to believe this album will be any different. I don't need for them to "go back" to some way that they sounded in the distant past because I have really enjoyed the songs they've come up with in the recent past. I trust these artists to come up with music that excites me, because they have never failed to do so before. And I think one thing that has contributed to that is that, even though I am a different person than I was thirty years ago, one thing that hasn't changed is the attention that I give to new music from my favorite artists. When Vs. and Vitalogy came out, I listened to those albums every day for many months, but I also did the same for Lightning Bolt and Gigaton. I think, for a lot of people-- Pearl Jam fans but just music fans in general-- this is hard to do as they age. When you're 17 (and especially if you were 17 in 1992 when there were no smartphones, social media, podcasts or streaming and fewer TV channels), it's a lot easier to listen to an album incessantly (and emotions and hormones also have something to do with it) than it is in 2023 when you're 48 and have family and job responsibilities and spend a lot of your time on internet stuff that never used to occupy your time. If Pearl Jam released an album that sounded just like Ten today, there would be a lot of people who would stream it once or twice, go "meh" and rarely listen to it again, not because the music wasn't good but because they're not in the same place mentally and emotionally to discover what the music has to offer. (I think this is another downside of streaming; in the old days, to hear an album, you had to buy it, and when you bought it, you were invested in it. It had to be pretty bad for you not to give it a lot of listens. Streaming doesn't represent the same investment. If something doesn't grab people immediately, they move on to the zillion other things they can stream at minimal cost.)