Pearl Jam to Demo New Songs Next Month, Unveil Tres Mts. Side Project

The Pearl Jam camp shows no sign of slowing down. The revered Seattle band will begin recording the follow-up to their 2009 chart-topping album 'Backspacer' next month and finalize plans for this summer's 'Twenty' festival, amid a flurry of other activity within the group.

"We did a whole bunch of demos and everybody's got a disc of 25 [songs] right now," bassist Jeff Ament tells Billboard of the quintet's looming studio plans. "April will be the time where we get together and learn to play all these demos and figure out which 12-15 of them float to the top. Hopefully we can get something done this year."

"There's been so much focus on the past that I think all of us are really excited to make a new record and have something to look forward to because we've been digging in the boxes in our basement a lot the last year or so," Ament adds.

If that's not enough, frontman Eddie Vedder will tour behind his forthcoming ukelele-steered solo album, which is expected in June. Meanwhile, there's a Cameron Crowe-directed documentary about Pearl Jam on the way, and Ament is at work on a second solo album just as he publicly launches his supergroup/side project called Tres Mts..

Tres Mts. -- which includes former Fastbacks drummer Richard Stuverud and King's X frontman dUg Pinnick -- will make their live debut at SXSW this week before embarking on a short East Coast tour in support of 'Three Mountains,' their first release. But the group's roots date back a decade and a half. Stuverud and Ament have been jamming together for more than two decades, but things got magical when Pinnick joined the fold when his band toured with Pearl Jam in 1994.

"We used to have a practice setup backstage and a couple of times that we were jamming and I would say, 'We gotta make a super heavy, old-school '60s R&B record together,'" says Ament in a different interview. "This record isn't necessarily that, but there are moments."