Soundgarden

• 1. Introduction

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  Soundgarden took its name from a sculpture of wind-channeling pipes called A Sound Garden. The artwork stands on National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration property at 7600 Sand Point Way, beside Magnuson Park in Seattle. The band said the name was meant to hold many roots at once. Guitarist Kim Thayil listed a virtual plethora of cutting edge rock that spans Velvet Underground, Meat Puppets and Killing Joke. The band also pointed to Metallica Gothicism and sublime poetry. In their words, the almost ethereal flavour of the name betrays the brutality of the music but never pins Soundgarden in one corner. That is a bold promise for a group that helped carry loud, murky guitar music out of one American city and into the mainstream. How did a handful of Seattle musicians get there? Why did a band at the height of its fame walk away? And what happens to a band's unfinished music when its singer is gone?

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• 2. Seattle Roots

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  Before Soundgarden there was a Seattle band called the Shemps, which played around town in the early 1980s. Its lineup included bassist Hiro Yamamoto and Chris Cornell, who sang and played drums. After Yamamoto left, the Shemps recruited guitarist Kim Thayil to play bass. Thayil had moved to Seattle from Park Forest, Illinois, together with Yamamoto and Bruce Pavitt, who would later start the independent label Sub Pop. When the Shemps broke up, Cornell and Yamamoto stayed in touch and began jamming. Thayil joined them, and in 1984 the trio became Soundgarden, with Cornell on drums and vocals, Yamamoto on bass and Thayil on guitar.

  In 1985 Scott Sundquist joined on drums so that Cornell could concentrate on singing. That lineup spent about a year playing concerts. Their first recordings arrived in 1986, when three songs appeared on Deep Six, a compilation from C/Z Records. The songs were "Heretic," "Tears to Forget" and "All Your Lies." Green River, Skin Yard, Malfunkshun, the U-Men and the Melvins shared the record. Also in 1986, Susan Silver, then Cornell's girlfriend and later his wife, began managing the band. That same year Sundquist left to spend time with his family. Matt Cameron, a former Skin Yard drummer, took his seat.

  Jonathan Poneman, a DJ at the station KCMU, watched the band play one night and later said, "I saw this band that was everything rock music should be." He offered to fund a release, and Thayil suggested he team up with Pavitt. Poneman put in $20,000, which effectively turned Sub Pop into a full record label. Soundgarden became the first of several grunge bands to sign there. The label issued the single "Hunted Down" in 1987, along with the Screaming Life EP. The Fopp EP followed in 1988, and the two EPs were combined in 1990. The B-side of the single, "Nothing to Say," landed on a KCMU tape called Bands That Will Make Money, which went out to record companies. Many of them showed interest, and as Soundgarden's success grew, Sub Pop grew into a serious label too. Even so, the band chose a different independent label for its first full album.

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• 3. Major Label Gamble

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  The 31st of October 1988 brought Ultramega OK, the band's debut album, on SST Records. Major labels were already courting Soundgarden. Cornell later said the band "made a huge mistake with Ultramega OK" by using a producer suggested by SST, who "didn't know what was happening in Seattle." Steve Huey of AllMusic heard a "Stooges/MC5-meets-Zeppelin/Sabbath sound." Mark Miremont directed the band's first music video, for "Flower," which aired regularly on MTV's 120 Minutes. The album did not sell well nationally. It did bring critical praise and a Grammy nomination for Best Metal Performance in 1990. The band toured the United States in the spring of 1989 and began its first overseas tour, in Europe, that May.

  Thayil described what the next step cost them. Early fans from the punk crowd, he said, "abandoned us when they thought we sold out the punk tenets." The band had signed with A&M Records in mid-1988, making it the first grunge band on a major label. He added that people felt Soundgarden no longer belonged to their scene or their subculture.

  Louder Than Love, released on the 5th of September 1989, was the band's first major-label album. Yamamoto had pulled away from the group, and Cornell said the music stopped flowing freely, so he wrote much of it himself. Huey called the result "a slow, grinding, detuned mountain of Sabbath/Zeppelin riffs and Chris Cornell wailing." Lyrics on "Hands All Over" and "Big Dumb Sex" caused retail and distribution problems. Still, the record peaked at number 108 on the Billboard 200, the first grunge album to appear on that chart. "Hands All Over" and "Loud Love" earned airtime on MTV's Headbangers Ball and on rock stations outside Seattle, including KNAC, WMMS, KRZQ and WBCN.

  A month before the tour for that album, Yamamoto left to return to college, frustrated that he was contributing so little. Rehearsals with Jim Tillman of the U-Men did not work out. Jason Everman, formerly of Nirvana, officially took over on bass. The band toured North America from December 1989 to March 1990, opening for Voivod, who were supporting their album Nothingface. Faith No More and the Big F also opened at the start and end of the run. Soundgarden fired Everman in mid-1990, and Thayil put it simply: "Jason just didn't work out." The next bassist was Ben Shepherd, and he would change how the band wrote.

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• 4. Breakthrough Years

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  Cornell said Ben Shepherd brought a "fresh and creative" approach to the sessions for Badmotorfinger, which came out on the 8th of October 1991. Huey wrote that the songwriting took "a quantum leap in focus and consistency." Thayil compared the lyrics to reading a novel about a man's conflict with himself, society, the government, his family or the economy.

  MTV banned the video for "Jesus Christ Pose" in 1991. Many viewers took the song as anti-Christian, and the band received death threats while touring the United Kingdom. Cornell explained that the lyrics criticize public figures who use religion, particularly the image of Jesus Christ, to portray themselves as persecuted. Nirvana's Nevermind overshadowed the album at its release. Yet the attention Nevermind brought to Seattle helped Soundgarden find a wider audience. "Outshined" and "Rusty Cage" caught on with alternative radio and MTV. Badmotorfinger earned a Grammy nomination for Best Metal Performance in 1992 and ranked among the year's 100 top-selling albums. It reached number 39 on the Billboard 200 and is certified double-platinum.

  Guns N' Roses chose Soundgarden to open its Use Your Illusion tour. Cornell recalled it bluntly: "It wasn't a whole lot of fun going out in front of 40,000 people for 35 minutes every day." Most of the crowd, he said, had never heard the songs. The band also opened for Skid Row on the Slave to the Grind tour in February 1992 and headlined a month-long theater tour of Europe. Soundgarden then joined the 1992 Lollapalooza tour with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam, Ministry and Ice Cube. Ahead of that tour, the band reissued Badmotorfinger with a second disc, the EP Satanoscillatemymetallicsonatas, a palindrome. It held a cover of Black Sabbath's "Into the Void," retitled "Into the Void (Sealth)," which earned a Grammy nomination in 1993. The band also appeared in the film Singles, performing "Birth Ritual."

  Superunknown reached stores on the 8th of March 1994 and debuted at number one on the Billboard 200. Its singles included "Spoonman," "The Day I Tried to Live," "Black Hole Sun," "My Wave" and "Fell on Black Days." Cornell said the band gave one another more freedom than on past records, and Thayil noted that they spent far more time recording. The lyrics were dark and mysterious, often read as dealing with substance abuse, suicide and depression. Sylvia Plath inspired Cornell's writing at the time. Some songs drew on Middle-Eastern or Indian music. J. D. Considine of Rolling Stone wrote that the album "demonstrates far greater range than many bands manage in an entire career." The video for "Black Hole Sun" won Best Metal/Hard Rock Video at the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards and a Clio Award in 1995. At the 1995 Grammys, "Black Hole Sun" won Best Hard Rock Performance and "Spoonman" won Best Metal Performance. The album has been certified six times platinum in the United States and remains the band's biggest seller.

  Touring began in January 1994 in Oceania and Japan, where the album came out early and the band had never played. Europe followed in March, and a United States theater and arena tour opened on the 27th of May 1994 at the PNE Forum in Vancouver, with Tad and Eleven as openers. Late that year, doctors found that Cornell had severely strained his vocal cords, and the band canceled several shows. He blamed the pace of five or six nights a week. "You don't buy a ticket to see some guy croak for two hours!" he said. The band made up the dates in 1995, the year it also issued the EP Songs from the Superunknown and a CD-ROM called Alive in the Superunknown.

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• 5. Odd Meters and Heavy Roots

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  Kim Thayil once described the band's sound as "Sabbath-influenced punk." He and his bandmates cited the Minutemen, the Butthole Surfers, Wire and Joy Division as key early influences, and Black Sabbath shaped the riffs and tunings. British post-punk bands such as Gang of Four and Bauhaus were popular in early 1980s Seattle, and they left a mark too. So did the Ramones, Kiss, Accept, the Melvins and Saint Vitus. Cornell summed up the journey this way: the band began as post-punk and pretty quirky, then found a "neo-Sabbath psychedelic rock that fitted well with who we were."

  Led Zeppelin comparisons followed the band from the start. Joe Gore of Guitar Player wrote in 1990 that Soundgarden "leaves fresh footprints on the well-trodden Zeppelin path," thanks largely to Thayil's guitar work. The band first pushed back. Thayil admitted, "So initially we would deny that influence." Then, after practice, they began putting on Led Zeppelin IV and Houses of the Holy. In time they re-embraced Zeppelin, the Beatles, Sabbath and Pink Floyd, and Thayil said, "This has a lot to do with our upbringing." Q magazine noted the band was in thrall to 1970s rock but contemptuous of the genre's overt sexism and machismo.

  The rhythms were stranger than most radio hits. "Fell on Black Days" is in 6/4, and "Limo Wreck" is played in 15/8. "The Day I Tried to Live" alternates between 7/8 and 4/4 sections, and the main riff of "Circle of Power" is in 5/4. The tunings dropped low as well. On "Rusty Cage" the low E string is tuned down to B. "Been Away Too Long," "My Wave" and "The Day I Tried to Live" share a tuning of E-E-B-B-B-B. Thayil said the band usually did not think about time signature until after a song was written, and called the odd meters "a total accident." He added that if Soundgarden were in the business of hit singles, "we'd at least write songs in 4/4 so you could dance to them." Three songs from the next album, "Burden in My Hand," "Head Down" and "Pretty Noose," used yet another tuning, C-G-C-G-G-E.

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• 6. Breakup and Return

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  Down on the Upside reached stores on the 21st of May 1996, and the band produced it themselves. Tensions reportedly flared in the studio, with Thayil and Cornell allegedly clashing over Cornell's wish to move away from heavy guitar riffing. Cornell said it felt like "a long, hard haul," though the band was discovering new things. The record was notably less heavy, with acoustic instrumentation and lyrics that Cornell described as partly "self-affirming." David Browne of Entertainment Weekly wrote, "Few bands since Led Zeppelin have so crisply mixed instruments both acoustic and electric." It debuted at number two and spawned "Pretty Noose," "Burden in My Hand" and "Blow Up the Outside World." "Pretty Noose" was nominated for a Grammy in 1997. Still, the album did not match the sales or praise of Superunknown.

  Metallica insisted that Soundgarden join the 1996 Lollapalooza tour, and a world tour followed. Asked whether the band hated touring, Cornell said they enjoyed it to a point, until it became repetitious. On the 9th of February 1997, at the last stop in Honolulu, Hawaii, Shepherd suffered an equipment failure, threw his bass into the air and stormed offstage. Cornell came back to close the show with a solo encore. On the 9th of April 1997 the band announced it was disbanding. Thayil pointed to the general attitude of the previous half year, and Cameron later said the band was "eaten up by the business." A greatest hits set, A-Sides, arrived on the 4th of November 1997 with 17 songs, including the previously unreleased "Bleed Together."

  Cornell released his first solo album, Euphoria Morning, in September 1999, with Cameron playing on "Disappearing One." By May 2001 he had joined Audioslave with Tom Morello, Tim Commerford and Brad Wilk, former members of Rage Against the Machine. That group recorded three albums and ended when Cornell left in early 2007. Cameron played drums on Pearl Jam's Yield Tour in 1998 after Jack Irons departed, then became an official member and stayed until July 2025. Thayil joined Jello Biafra, Krist Novoselic and Gina Mainwal for one show as The No WTO Combo, during the WTO ministerial conference in Seattle on the 1st of December 1999. Shepherd sang on the 1997 debut of Wellwater Conspiracy and later toured with Mark Lanegan.

  A 2008 meeting about the band's shared financial and legal affairs revealed that Soundgarden had no website or Facebook page. Thayil admitted, "We kind of had neglected our merchandise over the last decade." In March 2009, Thayil, Shepherd and Cameron played a few Soundgarden songs onstage at a Tad Doyle concert in Seattle. Cornell said it "sort of sparked the idea" that the whole band could do the same. Yet in July 2009 he told Rolling Stone that no one had discussed a reunion. Three months later, on the 6th of October 2009, all four members watched Pearl Jam at the Gibson Amphitheatre in Universal City, California. Temple of the Dog reunited during the encore, and Cornell sang "Hunger Strike."

  On the 1st of January 2010, Cornell posted on Twitter, "The 12-year break is over and school is back in session." Soundgarden played its first show since 1997 on the 16th of April 2010 at the Showbox at the Market in Seattle, then headlined Lollapalooza on the 8th of August. A new song, "Black Rain," debuted in the video game Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock and became the band's first single since 1997. The compilation Telephantasm came out in September 2010. In 2012 the band released "Live to Rise" for the film The Avengers as a free iTunes download on the 17th of April. King Animal, their sixth and final studio album, followed on the 13th of November 2012 on Republic Records, produced by Adam Kasper. Dave Grohl directed the video for "By Crooked Steps." A three-CD box set of rarities, Echo of Miles, arrived in November 2014. It included a newly recorded "Storm," based on a 1985 demo that Jack Endino had produced.

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• 7. After Cornell

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  On the 18th of May 2017, Chris Cornell was found dead in his room at the MGM Grand hotel and casino in Detroit, Michigan, after performing at the Fox Theatre with Soundgarden. The Wayne County Medical Examiner's Office determined that he died by suicide. His widow, Vicky, publicly questioned whether he would have deliberately ended his own life. The band canceled the rest of its 2017 tour, including headlining shows at Rock on the Range and Rocklahoma.

  In September 2017, Matt Cameron told Billboard that the surviving members had made no decision about the band's future. He said they were extremely private people, processing their grief in their own way and on their own time. A year later, in October 2018, Thayil told the Seattle Times that the Soundgarden name would be retired. "There were four of us and now there's three of us," he said, and little remained to pursue beyond catalog work. The band was done, though not entirely silent.

  In January 2019 the remaining members played at a tribute concert and fundraiser at the Forum in Inglewood, California, organized by Vicky Cornell. Taylor Momsen, Marcus Durant, Brandi Carlile and Taylor Hawkins sang with the band on "Rusty Cage," "Flower," "Outshined," "Drawing Flies," "Loud Love," "I Awake," "The Day I Tried to Live" and "Black Hole Sun." It was their first performance since Cornell's death.

  In December 2019, Vicky Cornell sued the surviving members over seven unreleased recordings Cornell made at his personal studio in Florida in 2017. She argued that there was never an explicit agreement that the songs were meant for Soundgarden. The band countered that they had worked jointly with Cornell on what they called the final Soundgarden album, their eighth. In May 2020 they countersued over revenue from the tribute concert, then dropped that suit in July 2020. On the 10th of August 2020, Hipgnosis Songs Fund, the company of Nile Rodgers and Merck Mercuriadis, acquired 100% of Cornell's song rights, a catalog of 241 songs that included Soundgarden's.

  In February 2021, Vicky Cornell filed another suit, saying the band had undervalued her share. She said the members offered less than $300,000 even though another investor had offered $16 million for the band's master recordings. The band said every offer to buy out its interests was unsolicited and rejected. Locked out of its own accounts, the band opened new social media profiles under the name Nude Dragons, an anagram of Soundgarden. On the 15th of June 2021 it recovered its website and original accounts under a temporary agreement.

  On the 17th of April 2023 it was revealed that seven final recordings with Cornell would be released once the dispute ended. On the 14th of December 2024 the surviving members performed in Seattle as Nudedragons, with vocalist Shaina Shepherd, at a benefit for Seattle Children's Hospital. In a September 2025 interview with Billboard, Cameron said he, Thayil and Shepherd were "definitely over halfway done with" the remaining eight songs.

  On the 8th of November 2025, Jim Carrey inducted Soundgarden into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Original bassist Hiro Yamamoto joined the surviving members onstage for the first time in 36 years. Momsen and Mike McCready sang "Rusty Cage" with them, and Carlile and Jerry Cantrell joined for "Black Hole Sun." Cornell's daughter Toni then sang the band's "Fell on Black Days."

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• 8. Legacy

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  By 2019, Soundgarden had sold more than 14 million records in the United States and an estimated 30 million worldwide. VH1 ranked the band at number 14 on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock. In 2017, Metal Injection placed them third among the 10 heaviest grunge bands, and Loudwire counts them among grunge's "big four," alongside Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam and Nirvana. Ben Shepherd rejected the label in a 2013 interview. "We never were grunge," he said, "we were just a band from Seattle."

  Kurt Cobain was a fan, and Soundgarden's ties to Sub Pop reportedly influenced him to sign Nirvana with the same label. Cobain said Soundgarden was one of the only Seattle bands he liked, along with Tad and Mudhoney. Footage in the 2015 documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck shows him impersonating Cornell singing "Outshined." Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains called Soundgarden a big influence on his band.

  In 1994, Electronic Arts approached A&M Records about licensing the band's music for a CD-based entry in the Road Rash video game series. The label hesitated because no one had licensed music for games before. Cornell and his bandmates were enthusiastic, since they were fans of the games and played them on their tour bus. A&M then used the band's permission as leverage to bring other labelmates into the game, including Monster Magnet, Paw, Swervedriver, Therapy? and Hammerbox. Because of Soundgarden's involvement, the 3DO version of Road Rash is credited with transforming how licensed music is used in video games.

  Henry Wilson of Hit Parader called the band's music "a study in contrasts," heavy yet ethereal. Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic said, "Soundgarden made a place for heavy metal in alternative rock." Ben Ratliff of Rolling Stone called them the "standard-bearers" of the rock riff during the 1990s. Cornell himself weighed in during a 2007 interview: "I think we were the most daring and experimental and genre-pushing really and I'm really proud of it."

  Other musicians have pointed to the band as well, including Biffy Clyro, the Dillinger Escape Plan, Cave In and Amy Lee of Evanescence. Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett has claimed that the riffs for "Enter Sandman" were inspired by Soundgarden. Pantera cited Louder Than Love as an inspiration for the change of direction on its 1990 album Cowboys from Hell, from glam metal to a heavier groove sound. That shift also led Pantera to hire Terry Date as producer. In November 2025 it was announced that Date had reunited with Soundgarden during the sessions for the band's unfinished final album.

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