Britpop band Pulp have announced their first album in 24 years, More. While the Jarvis Cocker-led group has been intermittently active over the past quarter-century, including a magical reunion tour in 2024, they hadn’t released an album since 2001’s We Love Life. That will change on June 6 with the arrival of More.
“Yes: the first Pulp album for 24 years,” Cocker confirmed in a statement Thursday. “How did that happen? Well: when we started touring again in 2023, we practiced a new song called ‘Hymn of the North’ during soundchecks & eventually played it at the end of our second night at Sheffield Arena. This seemed to open the floodgates: we came up with the rest of the songs on this album during the first half of 2024. A couple are revivals of ideas from last century.”
Cocker added that More was recorded over three weeks — “This is the shortest amount of time a Pulp album has ever taken to record. It was obviously ready to happen” — starting in Nov. 2024 with producer James Ford. Cocker also dedicated the album to late Pulp bassist Steve Mackey, who died in March 2023.
“We hope you enjoy the music. It was written & performed by four human beings from the North of England, aided & abetted by five other human beings from various locations in the British Isles,” Cocker quipped. “No A.I. was involved during the process.”
The subject of A.I. informs the video for More’s leadoff song and first single, “Spike Island,” which was inspired by a 1990 Stone Roses show at the venue of the same name. “I was told that someone was interested in investigating A.I. & did I have any ideas?” Cocker said. “The first idea I had was to animate the photographs that Rankin & Donald took for Different Class: after all, back in 1995 they had been an ‘artificial’ way of dropping us into real-life situations & getting an album cover done whilst we were too busy recording the music for that album to pose for pictures. No brainer.”
“It was my initial idea to produce a kind of ‘making of’ video that showed how the photos had come to be taken – but as soon as I fed the first shot into the A.I. app I realized that wasn’t going to happen. So I decided to ‘go with the flow’ & see where the computer led me. All the moving images featured in the video are the result of me feeding in a still image & then typing in a ‘prompt’ such as: ‘The black & white figure remains still whilst the bus in the background drives off, which led to the sequence where the coach weirdly slides towards the cut-out of me,” Cocker continued.
“The weekend I began work on the video was a strange time: I went out of the house & kept expecting weird transformations of the surrounding environment due to the images the computer had been generating. The experience had marked me. I don’t know whether I’ve recovered yet…..”
More is available to preorder now via Rough Trade, including “four single-disc color vinyl pressings that have been both handpicked and named by Jarvis Cocker personally.” In addition to the new album, Pulp also announced a pair of co-headlining gigs with LCD Soundsystem on Sept. 25 and 26 at Los Angeles’ Hollywood Bowl.
More Track List
“Spike Island”
“Tina”
“Grown Ups”
“Slow Jam”
“Farmers Market”
“My Sex”
“Got To Have Love”
“Background Noise”
“Partial Eclipse”
“The Hymn of the North”
“A Sunset”
From Rolling Stone US
