In a recent interview with SPIN, Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard admitted that the band no longer has the stamina to pull off three-hour shows night after night. (Bassist Jeff Ament has already crossed the threshold into his 60s, and Vedder will join him there this December.) But on Dark Matter, they cannonball into the fountain of youth at the behest of producer Andrew Watt, the Post Malone/Justin Bieber associate who’s more recently applied his platinum touch to rock elders seeking a musical Botox injection. As a superfan who learned guitar by playing along to Pearl Jam songs, Watt seizes the opportunity to doll up his favorite band with more polish and punch, though, a certain Vs. standard that it could’ve easily been titled “Granddaughter.”

After spending much of the ’90s cycling through drummers with near-Spinal Tap-like expediency, Pearl Jam finally found their ride-or-die replacement in Matt Cameron, whose schedule had freed up considerably following Soundgarden’s 1997 dissolution. With Cameron, Pearl Jam not only welcomed in a familiar face who came pre-loaded with an intimate working knowledge of the group, they also gained another industrious songwriter who had a hand in crafting a number of Soundgarden classics. While Cameron has since gone on to co-write several Pearl Jam tunes over the years, “Get It Back” is one of the few where he gets to claim sole credit. It’s a deceptive Trojan Horse of a song, beginning in an incense-scented psychedelic haze before hardening into an agitated rocker that climaxes with a fiery guitar solo. “Get It Back” is a welcome reminder that, in addition to his dual citizenship in Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, Cameron was also one of the masterminds behind the short-lived and highly underrated acid-rock combo the Wellwater Conspiracy.

Unlike many veteran acts, Pearl Jam never lost their capacity to rock out convincingly, but the way in which they rock out has changed considerably since their early days. Ten and Vs. took a lot of rhythmic cues from groove-driven alt-rockers like Red Hot Chili Peppers and Jane’s Addiction, effectively putting bassist Jeff Ament in the captain’s chair. But since then, Pearl Jam seem more comfortable in crunchy Crazy Horse and Stones-on-streoids mode, emphasizing the revved-up twin-guitar roar of Gossard and Mike McCready. As a result, “My Father’s Son” pops out of the otherwise anodyne Lightning Bolt by bringing some of Ament’s four-string flair back to the fore, while Vedder responds with the sort of manic, teeth-gnashing performance that suggests he’s looking for the nearest lighting rig to dangle from. And the old-school vibe doesn’t end there, as Vedder digs deeper into the dysfunctional family dynamics first introduced on “Alive.” If that Ten classic documented the moment where Vedder discovered the truth about the man who raised him, “My Father’s Son” catalogs the seismic, still-lingering aftershocks.

In 2007, Vedder delivered the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame induction speech for R.E.M., a band whose influence wasn’t really audible amid the crowd-surfing clamor of Pearl Jam’s early records. But by 2002’s Riot Act, it was undeniable: The album’s centerpiece single “I Am Mine,” is a swaying, Southern gothic shanty that could’ve tumbled out of the Automatic For The People sessions. And the B-side “Undone” is an even more loving tribute to the Athens college-rock legends — while its lyrics are dripping with Dubya-era despair, the song’s jangly guitars and soaring harmonies are highly reminiscent of the music R.E.M. was making back in the Reagan years. In that Hall Of Fame speech, Vedder told the story of seeing R.E.M. playing a small club in Chicago in 1984 and how the experience “changed how I listen to music and what I listened to.” “Undone” sounds like precisely the kind of song he might’ve written while basking in that afterglow.

When Pearl Jam dropped the lead single from 2020’s Gigaton — the synth-shocked, Talking Heads-styled funk freakout “Dance Of The Clairvoyants” — there was hope that the album might shake up Pearl Jam’s workmanlike approach with some Vitalogy-style audacity. But if the album ultimately fell short of that expectation, it did at least match Vitalogy’s CD-stuffing near-hour-long run time, giving the band ample time and space to unfurl the sprawling canvas of “Seven O’Clock.” Clocking in at 6:14, it’s among the longest (proper) songs in the PJ canon, but “Seven O’Clock” isn’t so much an epic by design as by necessity. The song is that long simply because Vedder has too much on his mind, his verses rolling into one another with nary a pause as he surveys the perilous state of the world — rising oceans, screen addiction, and Donald Trump included — with the grave solemnity of a doctor delivering bad news to a patient. But the choruses hit like sunbeams bursting through the dark clouds, evoking the synthy symphonics of The Who’s Quadrophenia or the string-swept grandeur of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb.” As the song fades out into the horizon, Vedder repeats the words “much to be done” with equal doses of worry and hope, transforming the song’s dystopian diagnosis into a call to action.

It’s not a stretch to imagine a certain subset of younger Pearl Jam fans who know little of the band’s grunge roots and instead think of them as a congenial folk-rock act. By a considerable margin, Pearl Jam’s most popular post-2000 songs in the streaming era have been acoustic-based serenades: the Lightning Bolt power ballad “Sirens,” and the Backspacer campfire lullaby “Just Breathe,” which has since been ushered into the country canon through covers by Miley Cyrus and Willie Nelson. But Riot Act’s “Thumbing My Way” feels like the closest thing in the Pearl Jam canon to a true, lived-in country standard, distilling the genre’s age-old themes — lost love, regret, and the long, hard road to redemption — into a humbling hymn delivered by Vedder with a wounded poignancy. (Memo to Willie: Don’t sleep on this one.)

If Vitalogy was Pearl Jam’s most important album from a musical and spiritual-evolution standpoint, then 2000’s Binaural marked a crucial turning point from a purely commercial perspective. A year prior to its release, Pearl Jam scored the highest-charting single of their career with their winsome cover of the early-’60s golden oldie “Last Kiss,” but Binaural proved to be a dividing line between casual PJ fans and the cult that stands by them to this day: It was the band’s first album that failed to go platinum in the US. Though not without its quality corkers, Binaural leans heavily into the earthy, atmospheric sound of producer Tchad Blake, and while it’s been reclaimed as an unsung masterwork by a certain contingent of the base, you can’t help but wonder if the album would’ve been more enthusiastically received by the masses if the band had promoted the excellent outtake “Sad” to the final tracklist. Built around a psych-tinged guitar refrain that blurs the line between riff and solo, “Sad” — which eventually emerged on the rarities collection Lost Dogs — is a stark portrait of a man reeling from the death of his partner, but it doesn’t so much wallow in sorrow as capture the fevered, sleepless-night agitation of laying in a suddenly empty bed. Fueled by high drama and ticking-time-bomb intensity, “Sad” could’ve been Binaural’s “Rearviewmirror”-level centerpiece instead of a largely forgotten footnote.

Ask anyone to imitate Eddie Vedder and nine times out of 10, they’ll start singing “Even Flow” in an impossibly deep voice — i.e. the sound that Scotts Weiland and Stapp took to the bank. But Vedder really does his best work in the higher register, when he works himself into such a frantic, fevered state, he almost sounds like he’s having fun. Pearl Jam have always been great at kicking off their records with a fierce one-two punch, and the pair that kicks off their 2006 self-titled album feel especially like conjoined twins in both content and form. Each song finds Vedder staring down the specter of death: “Life Wasted” is part eulogy to his friend Johnny Ramone, part promise to cherish every waking moment; “World Wide Suicide” is his raging response to the death of NFL player-turned-soldier Pat Tillman and the terrible human cost of Dubya’s misguided War On Terror. But both songs hit that uncanny sweet spot between weighty subject matter and free-spirited rock ‘n’ roll kicks, like a funeral procession peeling down an open freeway.

From day one, Pearl Jam have been a major-label operation, but their indie-rock roots run deep. And long after they graduated to the arena circuit, they maintained strong ties to the underground, whether spinning punk-rock faves on their mid-’90s pirate-radio broadcasts or taking freak-scene royalty like Sonic Youth, Sleater-Kinney, and Ted Leo on tour as openers. But Pearl Jam have never sounded more like a genuine indie-rock act than on “Light Years,” whose brittle beauty suggests an alternate ’90s where Pearl Jam were an obscure Pacific Northwest act signed to Up Records instead of a platinum-selling juggernaut for Epic/Sony. With its perfectly slack backbeat and subtly psychedelic guitar flourishes, “Light Years” is the rare Pearl Jam song you could imagine Pavement or Guided By Voices covering without radically altering its essence. But it’s also a testament to the telepathic intuition Pearl Jam had acquired over their first decade as a band, as those half-second pauses before each chorus line catapult this seemingly casual mid-tempo tune up to the same stratospheric heights as the group’s more overtly anthemic songs.

Pearl Jam’s 21st-century discography can be seen as an extended tug-of-war between aging and raging — the desire to share the grace and wisdom that comes with getting older, while still trying to hold onto the fire and passion of youth. And no song in their post-2000 repertoire reconciles those two extremes as effectively and efficiently as “The Fixer,” where Vedder grapples with the struggle of being all things to all people and the impossibility of reliving the past. “When something’s gone, I wanna fight to get it back again,” he sings at the end of the first verse, and as he repeats those words through the chorus, the line between determination and desperation is increasingly blurred. Likewise, the sound of “The Fixer” hovers somewhere between Pearl Jam’s primal, plug ‘n’ play energy and their latter-day melodic finesse, yielding an atypically new-wavish power-pop rave-up that stands as the most immediately catchy song in their canon. Pearl Jam have covered the Beatles on a number of occasions, but “The Fixer” is the PJ song that best demonstrates the Fabs’ first golden rule: Nothing brings people together quite like an ecstatic “Yeah yeah yeah!”