Billboard reports that during a conference call regarding Pearl Jam's headlining spot at Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival on June 14, founding member Mike McCready revealed that the band is at work on new material with longtime producer Brendan O'Brien.
"We've had one session of writing and it has yielded about five ideas so far," McCready said. "Some of it's kind of poppy and some of it's a little hard. We want it to grow up a little bit. We have to revisit it a few times."
As for whether Pearl Jam will debut any of this new material at Bonnaroo or during their 10-city tour this June, McCready said, "We might get into some sort of jam. We have about 200 songs to pull from, so we'll do that and maybe do some obscure B-sides. For new stuff, I don't know if we have it refined enough to want to play it in front of an audience yet. We don't want to hack in front of everybody."
In 2006 the band released their eighth album, Pearl Jam, which debuted at No. 2 on the charts and is certified gold.