Soundgarden was one of the few bands that got announced as nominees for the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame Class of 2020 alongside bands like Motorhead and Nine Inch Nails. In an interview right after the announcement, guitarist Kim Thayil spoke to Billboard about what he dubbed the "current enterprise" of Soundgarden. He then clarified there are "still things we want to release — old tapes, some live performances," later citing such albums as the mostly-unreleased Louder Than Live live album.
“The Louder Than Love album just passed its 30 anniversary. We were very busy this year with other anniversary releases and, of course, the Artists Den release, but Louder Than Love will get a special package, probably to celebrate its 31st anniversary. And I think we’d like to put the Louder Than Live album out; It was released promotionally back in the day but never available commercially.
Since it’s all over YouTube we should make a nice little package available for release, including the DV, which was us live at The Whisky. That would be the one document of Jason Everman‘s time with us.”
Thayil also discussed putting out new material. He said there's some early material he has that he'd like to put out, as well as material they were working on at the time of vocalist Chris Cornell's death.
“There’s stuff we recorded back in the early days with Sub Pop, just low-budget eight-track stuff we did with Jack Endino that never came out. In terms of stuff we’re working on, that’s kind of static right now. At some point we hope to work on that and complete the material we were writing.”
Thayil recently said in an interview that he and the band were not in possession "of any of the demos that Chris was working on with them. We have copies of them, but what we need are the files, so that we’d be able to overdub and finish the record." He also added he's not sure how to get the files from the appropriate parties, so we'll see what happens.
