Gigaton and Dark Matter – Then and Now
I have been thinking a lot about
Gigaton and
Dark Matter recently. Both of these albums landed with a visceral immediacy that made them feel like masterpieces, and I hailed them as such. They elicited emotional reactions from me that, even by Pearl Jam standards, were unexpected and profound. Each was absolutely the right record for its moment, full of songs I didn’t know I was waiting for and had no idea I needed. But recency bias is a real thing, and their true impact is best measured by time - their ability to evolve and stay relevant, evoke something eternal, or perfectly trap a moment you can relive forever.
On March 27th Gigaton turned five, and April 19th marked one year since the release of Dark Matter. And these small but significant anniversaries offer the perfect opportunity to assess their staying power and see if they have earned their place in my pantheon of great Pearl Jam albums (My personal rankings have Dark Matter at 4 and Gigaton at 5. I love these records).
For me, the closest point of comparison are Riot Act and Pearl Jam, the last pairing of records that, with deliberate intent and specificity, spoke directly to their time and place. Together, they offered a musical reckoning with that era of American life, equal parts diagnosis and catharsis. Riot Act tried and failed to make sense of the dislocating strangeness of a post 9-11 America, where President Bush took the unifying potential found in that moment of desolation and turned it against itself. He transformed our profound solidarity into a bitter space contested by us and them, demanding we define ourselves not by what we believe, but by who we oppose. You were either with us, or you are with the terrorists. No time for doubt, no space for nuance – yielding certainty without answers. And those who dared to question were cast out of the tribe. Left to wander the wilderness, alone.
Four years later, the world looked very different. Though still in office, Bush’s legacy had been written, its failure carved into history through ruined nations abroad and the drowned streets of New Orleans at home. And dissent flooded back into the space left by Bush’s retreat, as Pearl Jam’s songs named the blood cost the world paid for an administration’s feckless lying and incompetence borne of arrogance. The songs felt liberating, the release of a long held primal scream, but as an album its true power was unlocked through its juxtaposition with Riot Act. Each record was a companion piece to the other – the exile into the desert, and the return to civilization. The silencing and regaining of voice. And both endure, in their way. The best parts of Riot Act are divorced from the specificity of that moment and still call out to anyone who got lost trying to find their way home. Pearl Jam, on the other hand, began to feel dated, its rage very much of a moment whose time had passed. At least until recently. You would be hard pressed to find a better description of our current body politic than “Comatose”, and songs like “World Wide Suicide” and “Army Reserve” feel freshly relevant when you focus less on the narrative particulars and more on the fact that we still pay the cost of other people’s sins.
Like the Bush era records, both Gigaton and Dark Matter are responses to our time, with the end nowhere in sight. Gigaton was about the responsibilities we have to leave a better world for the generations that will follow. It was an optimistic album that stared into the future and found, within its dark, immeasurable distance, that light still endures. The album title and art asked us to think about this in environmental terms, but released as it was in March of 2020, it was impossible to listen to Gigaton as anything other than an eerily prophetic anticipation of the COVID-19 pandemic. The world had literally shut down. We faced a disease that would kill over a million people in the United States alone. Little understood, with no cure. As I wrote in my review at the time, I was terrified. The world was on fire, and no one was coming to save us. We had to become the adults in the room. We had to fix it. We had to save ourselves.
And Gigaton’s message of hope was what I held onto during those early months. It was, at its core, a record that become more optimistic the more darkness you poured into it. When Eddie sang ‘all the answers will be found in the mistakes that we had made’ or promised that ‘hope dies last’ I clung to those words like I was drowning. For months those lyrics never left my head. And every one of those songs helped me process my lived experience in real time. The way “Quick Escape” ends like a rocket exploding after liftoff, trapping us here and clarifying the work “Seven O’Clock” challenges us to take on. “Retrograde” reminds us that nothing lasts forever, and within that impermanence is hope, if we reach for it. And “River Cross” promises that, together, we will find a way forward.
And we did. We survived. But we didn’t do it together. Like President Bush before him, Trump, and the forces he enables and embodies, took that moment of unity and tore it apart. The brief experience of solidarity, the recognition that we are stronger when we lean into each other, even when our bodies had to remain apart, shattered. We reached levels of absurdity that made the post 9-11 environment seem sane, where simply being asked to wear a mask in public was seen as a monstrous violation of liberty to people whose identity could only exist in opposition. Recognizing our communities sustain us, and are therefore worth protecting, became not just political, but partisan. We left that era united by an awful common experience, the incredible triumph of having survived it, and more divided than ever. Some of us built boats, while others set them on fire, and collectively, we failed. We failed to recognize our only way forward is together. We failed to cross that river.
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| Credit: Geoff Whitman |
The Gigaton tour, when it finally happened, didn’t look like Riot Act. There were no Trump masks. Eddie’s concert speeches focused on building community and reclaiming solidarity through music. These shows were not about creating a political moment. They were about finding a way into the future, marking the boundaries of the road we must follow.
As befitting a record written collaboratively, Dark Matter sought to bridge that distance between us. It looked upon the wreckage of our world and realized we are long past the point of it mattering ‘who’s wrong and who’ right’. The central struggle of our time is about how to rebuild. Every song on that record is about the existential importance of human connections. Every moment an exploration of the power of and need for love, and the terrible price we pay in its absence. Dark Matter is breathless and relentless, and for all its searching, it contains a moral clarity rarely found in their music. Not because Pearl Jam has ever struggled to tell right from wrong, but because there was almost always an intellectual modesty, an uncertainty, a fear of committing too strongly lest someone get trapped in someone else’s conclusion.
Twelve albums and a lifetime into their career, it had become clear that love is the only source for the meaningful solidarity a better world requires. Dark Matter is a record in which almost every song grapples with the fear of ending while there is still work to be done, and yet it remains arguably Pearl Jam’s most optimistic record – if for no other reason than it finally offered the bands core thesis with more force and immediacy than ever before in songs like “Waiting For Stevie”, “Got to Give”, and “Setting Sun”. Dark Matter recognized the failures of Gigaton without invalidating its promise or refuting its humanism.
Despite the trauma of 2020-2024, these were hopeful records, offering light in the face of an expansive and growing darkness. But that was before 2025. These anniversaries occur in a very different world. An even darker world, one facing an even greater threat than COVID-19. That disease attacked the body, but it could be isolated, controlled, cured. The rot at the heart of American society speaks to the cancer in our souls. It lays bare the thin fragility of the ties that bind us together and reveals how easily those threads can burn.
The threat of COVID -19 was external. Today, we are at war with ourselves, and before we can set anything to right, we have to find a way to make peace without surrendering. Five years after Gigaton I am more afraid than ever. Perhaps it’s a new fear. But I suspect this is what I’ve feared all along – validation and proof that our worst instincts are not an aberration. That the ugliness in our souls defines us. That this, in fact, who we are.
What happens to all of us, if all we care about is destroying our enemies, rather than finding ways to live with them? If all we care about is winning, despite the cost we pay ourselves and force onto others? How do we escape the dark solipsism of our time? Gigaton speaks to the power of dreams, but what if we can only dream of nightmares?
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| Credit: Geoff Whitman |
In the Spring of 2024 Dark Matter played like a series of guideposts, reminders of the foundational truths capable of leading us to the home we spent a lifetime searching for. It felt more than aspirational. It finally felt achievable, as if Pearl Jam had at last found a way to make these ideas self-evident. You couldn’t listen to “Waiting for Stevie” without understanding that we can rise above the fears that diminish us. You couldn’t listen to “Got to Give” without feeling that it is our imperfections that bind us to each other and in the process make us strong. You couldn’t open your heart to Setting Sun and not walk out of the experience feeling cleansed. At peace. And not finished.
But the spring of 2024 is now, absurdly, a halcyon memory. Our country is not just on fire. It is burning down. There is real evil in the world, and it is ascendant, and it must be stopped. This is not hyperbolic. It is what clarity looks like. And “Dark Matter”, a song, that once felt like an outlier, now rings with the force of diagnostic prophecy. Its music sounds like a society collapsing in on itself, like endless waves of destruction drawing closer and closer until they finally wash over us – a dark inversion of Eddie’s favorite metaphor. The tired and beleaguered injustice we experience when ‘everybody else pays for someone else’s mistakes’ is the perfect encapsulation of what it means to live in this moment and fear it will last forever. Mike’s air raid guitar solo does not urge us to seek shelter. It rails against the grim reality that there is no safety to be found. Anywhere. One year out, Pearl Jam may have never written a song that so perfectly captures the immediate moment, helping me emotionally process an experience so totalizing I cannot find a single fixed point from which to describe it. In March 2024 “Dark Matter” was the warning we must heed. In April 2025 it is a challenge we must answer.
We are lost. I am less confident than ever we will be found. But our only way forward is together. That we have strayed so far from each other doesn’t make this any less true. And I will keep searching for that path home, because in the end we can either lay down and surrender, or we can find a way to walk it together. These are the choices before us, and Pearl Jam’s music has conditioned me not to give up. Five years from Gigaton the river is wider, deeper, more dangerous. But our only safety is on the other side. And the grace that Gigaton insists on extending to its enemies matters more than ever. Someday this will end, and we will have to find a way to live with each other. We will have to find a way to forgive each other, for not being our best selves. For failing the great test of our time. For being human.
The call to find the strength within ourselves so that we might love the worst of us is more urgent than ever. I wake up every day fighting off a burning desperation and crushing sense of powerlessness. A fierce hatred that terrifies and diminishes me. An instinct to surrender that is at moments overpowering. But these records have been out long enough to become a part of me, as every Pearl Jam album eventually does. Every day I am listening to these songs, even if I haven’t put them on. And every day they remind me that I am not alone. That this fight is not just mine. And it is not over. We may not cross the river. But we can hold each other up and not drown in our attempt. And maybe our children will someday make it across and succeed where we have failed. It falls to all of us to give them the chance we wasted. We may not live long enough to see the sun rise. But it does not have to set on our watch. It cannot. We owe it to the future, and we owe it to ourselves.
When I first heard Gigaton it felt like a gift. And I experienced Dark Matter as a revelation. But today, I experience them as necessities and obligations. There must be a way forward. We have to find it. And they are the soundtrack of my search.
