לא נכון, לא מדויק. הם התפרקו כי
הכימיה בינהם כבר לא עבדה לדבריהם והם גם הרגישו עייפים מלהיות סאונדגארדן, כל אחד רצה לעשות משהו אחר. מבחינת יצירתיות הם אמרו שהיה מצב לאלבומים נוספים ושהם הרגישו שהם יכלו לעשות עוד מוזיקה טובה אבל פשוט נגמר להם החשק מלהיות הלהקה הזאת. הנה מה שהם אמרו: "After 12 years, the members of Soundgarden have amicably and mutually decided to disband to pursue other interests. There is no word at this time on any of the members' future plans. They'd like to thank their fans for all of their support over the years." The following comments from Kim, Matt and Chris should make things more transparent: "The break-up isn't filled with as much drama as you'd like to believe. We simply got to the point where we didn't want to be Soundgarden anymore...This rock and roll thing is your job. You do that for 12 years, you love it, but in the course of 12 years, individuals establish and lose many relationships. Chris Cornell, Ben Shepherd, Matt Cameron and Kim Thayil all exist independently of that unit we called Soundgarden...You can't really break up the quartet. If we want to work together creatively then that's what we'll do. But there were these other social and cultural prosthetic devices, the crutches and the leg braces which were not being as supportive as they should have been." (Kim - Guitar World, February 1998) "Creatively, I thought we were still viable and could do more records. But our working relationship just wasn't happening at all, and our chemistry as people broke down because of that. No matter how much success you're having, you can't continue working together if you can't communicate. I felt our chemistry had been crumbling for quite a while, probably about a year before we went in to do Down On The Upside. But I started feeling the beginning of the end in those sessions." (Matt - Modern Drummer, July 1999) "We just needed some time apart from each other. Different members of the band were having uncomfortable feelings about every aspect of being Soundgarden. I can't think of another band that kept a better reign on their environment than we did, but still, once you start making millions of records, things get out of hand. We kind of ended up becoming a band of fans and expectations. We could deal with that stuff, but at some point we stopped dealing with it very well. And we knew it was time to stop." (Chris - Raygun, September 1999)
