Soundgarden play halftime at the Seahawks‘ season opener against New England on 9 September at Lumen Field.
Soundgarden will perform at halftime when the Seattle Seahawks open the NFL season at Lumen Field on Wednesday 9 September. Kim Thayil, Matt Cameron and Ben Shepherd will be joined by Taylor Momsen of The Pretty Reckless and Mike McCready of Pearl Jam, who also sings the national anthem beforehand.
McCready appears on behalf of the Washington Innocence Project, a Seahawks Spirit Of 12 partner.
The occasion is bigger than a standard opener. Seattle are the defending champions, having beaten the New England Patriots 29–13 in Super Bowl LX, and the two meet again in the first game of the season. The Seahawks will raise their Super Bowl banner that night.
It falls on a Wednesday rather than the usual Thursday because the Los Angeles Rams and San Francisco 49ers are playing an international fixture in Australia on the Thursday. Only four NFL games have been staged on a Wednesday since 1950, and the result is that Seattle become the ninth current franchise to have played on every day of the week.
Kick-off is at 5.20pm Pacific, on NBC and streaming through Peacock.
The performance follows the band’s Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame induction in November 2025 at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles, where Jim Carrey did the honours alongside Momsen, the two having previously worked together on “How The Grinch Stole Christmas” when she was a child actor.
Momsen and McCready joined Thayil, Cameron and Shepherd onstage that night, along with Jerry Cantrell of Alice In Chains and Brandi Carlile, for “Rusty Cage” and “Black Hole Sun“. Chris Cornell‘s daughter Toni Cornell then sang “Fell On Black Days” with Nancy Wilson of Heart.
Momsen has long named Soundgarden and Cornell as her formative influences, and The Pretty Reckless opened for the band on what turned out to be their final tour. The induction covered Thayil, Cameron, Shepherd, Cornell and original bassist Hiro Yamamoto, who was in the band from 1984 to 1989 and played on the first two EPs and first two albums.
Cameron has a further Seattle connection to the occasion: he spent 27 years in Pearl Jam with McCready before leaving in 2025.
Thayil, Cameron and Shepherd are still working on a record built from unreleased material the four of them recorded before Cornell died in May 2017. Terry Date, who produced Louder Than Love in 1989 and Badmotorfinger in 1991, is overseeing it, with Joe Barresi, whose credits include Avenged Sevenfold, Volbeat, Slipknot, Monster Magnet and Bad Religion, handling the mixing.
