21st Century Pearl Jam (7/7)

Seven weeks ago I began a header series on the 21st Century Pearl Jam albums, and we’ve finally made it to the band’s twelfth studio release, 2024’s Dark Matter.1By the by, they also put out, like, 300+ live albums in the 21st century, a good chunk of which are available on your usual streaming services. They are definitely worth checking out, because every setlist is different and the music is fantastic live. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, I recommend jumping into the Riot Act tour from 2003.

Dark Matter is great. It has rave reviews. It has big hits. And, as with all of Pearl Jam’s more accessible albums, you’ll see people rushing to compare it to their early work. But Dark Matter is not, say, Ten. Not even a little bit. Those twenty-somethings on Ten were fairly impressive, but there is a level of maturity on Dark Matter that you only get from five people who have made it to the far side of middle age creating music together.2The other two later albums that get the “it sounds just like their earlier stuff” treatment, Yield and Pearl Jam, don’t sound like their earlier stuff either.

Pearl Jam has never remade Ten. They never even tried. They never even wanted to try. And if they had tried, I doubt they’d still be putting out albums 30+ years later. We might not have had any 21st century Pearl Jam albums. And I hope over the last two months I’ve made a decent argument that that would have been a bummer.

Now if you want to say that, like Ten, Dark Matter is an energetic blockbuster of a rock album, then sure. Dark Matter has given Pearl Jam two number one hits on the modern rock airplay chart—their firsts since “Given to Fly” in 1998—with a third song in the top 10. And the energy on the album is palpable. Enough that I can almost forget that over the course of these seven album headers everyone in the band has gone from their mid-thirties to grandpa-adjacent.

But the cool thing is that the band’s evolution over those 24 years—and let’s go ahead and stretch it back all 34—has been captured in a clear arc across their twelve albums. I would argue that that arc is what makes the whole set a fascinating listen—much more so than if they had tried to remake the same album twelve times.

To sum up this series, I think it’s neat that I have a band in my life that connects my middle-school self to my middle-aged self. The band that wrote an empathetic song about “a young girl” when I was, well, a young girl, is still making music that I relate to in my forties.3I should note that unlike the subject of “Daughter” I had a delightful childhood. But the fact that cool young rock dudes would bother to make a little girl the central character of a song made me feel included in a way that a lot of music at the time did not. While their albums from the ‘90s get all the glory, if they were all that existed, the band would mostly be an occasional nostalgia listen for me. It’s the 21st century stuff that has kept me along for the ride. And it’s been a pretty great ride.

Thanks for letting me express that through Wednesday Day Thread headers on The Avocado 🫡

Here’s “Waiting for Stevie.”

Bonus Track: I hate to pick one of the big hits over some of the lesser-known tracks,4Here’s “Won’t Tell” I’m cheating in a footnote haha but the title track really showcases the energy of the album so I’m going with that.

Happy Day Threading!