In ‘More’, Pulp return not with a bang but with a graceful, knowing nod – like old friends who’ve learned that the quietest whispers can sometimes carry the heaviest truths. It’s a record suffused with a poignant maturity, and yet it dances with all the absurd, anxious glamour that has always made Pulp more than just a band—they are a mirror held to the face of modern Britain, cracked and beautiful. It’s incredible to think it’s been 24 years since their last album, and it is as if nothing has changed, the skin is just a little more saggy, the hairline has receded and the gray taken over. ‘More’ is just that: more of Pulp and it’s something we never realised how much we wanted this.
The first thing to say about ‘More’ is that it sounds unmistakably like Pulp—yet it also sounds like a band who have stood in the wings of their own mythology for too long, watching it calcify, waiting for the right moment to step forward again. That moment, it seems, has finally arrived. Jarvis Cocker’s voice has aged like spilled wine on a vintage coat: worn, acidic, rich with stories. The production is sparse yet glittering, letting every whispered word and every brittle synth stab cut with surgical precision. Cocker says of the release:
The day an album is released to the public is a very special day. The music changes from being something owned only by the band to something that can be owned by anyone – it can become part of people’s lives. It’s magic.
Opening track ‘Spike Island’ (home to a legendary Stone Roses gig) has all the arched, studied pose and anthemic qualities you could expect from what I consider to be the best band out of the Britpop era.
A throbbing bass and scything guitars over a synth bed, with Jarvis Cocker’s signatory sardonic style and witty lyrics feature along with the anthemic chorus. An obligatory spoken interlude and a few grunts and yelps along the way captures the band at its very best. It is so very good to have them back.
The track comes with a Cocker developed AI video that is surreal and twisted :
It’s followed by ‘Tina’ which has that a classic Pulp sound: bright and sparkly, a mix of spoken world and singing with a chorus that lifts the hairs on the back of your neck as Cocker reminisces about past obsessions with that intricate level of mundane detail Cocker does so well.
‘Grown Ups’ is the now over sixties Pulp – the other side of the wall from their early songs about pimply sex-obsessed adolescent characters to the realities of aging. Not in a ‘Help The Aged’ way with its melancholy, pathetic tone but more of a jaunty Benny Hill ‘Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West)’ bounce. And where would we be without at least one reference to knickers. Cocker’s narration is droll but deeply human, sketching out vignettes of a world half-remembered and half-invented. More feels like a time capsule of what it means to grow old in a city that never lets you feel young.
Musically, ‘More’ doesn’t reinvent Pulp’s wheel—but it does roll it down unexpected hills. ‘Slow Jam’ dips into ambient textures and electronic pulses that would be at home on a late-career Talk Talk record, with the odd funky bass slap. ‘Farmers Market’ is rich and lush, louche and reflective with its sweeping, weeping violins that seem to breathe with a tired wheezing.
‘My Sex’ is another aged sleazy half whispered diatribe – another sardonic look at aging and the unbreachable gap with desire – sonically it is Cocker’s geriatric answer to CSS’ ‘Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex’.
The theme continues in the jangly jaunt of ‘Got To Have Love’ with its solid gold soul disco blast and heart racing chorus. It’s a euphoric tectonic shift: shouty, joyous and utterly glorious with the trademark whispered spoken world interlude we come to expect from Cocker:
It builds to a euphoric, near-gospel climax that’s both ironic and strangely sincere. It’s as though Pulp are finally comfortable with contradictions: the sacred and profane, the mundane and the mythic. There is a knowing nod to earlier material – ‘Feeling Called Love’ in particular.
‘Background’ is an enigmatic track – slower paced, atmospheric with a double tracked Cocker lending a ghostly tone, but the inevitable soaring chorus. ‘Partial Eclipse’ is another dreamy recount of memories that drift in and out of the mind as a result of a long life: poised and statuesque with a hint of poignancy. Is a partial eclipse a glimpse of something potentially spectacular but not quite fulfilled? A palimpsest for our lives perhaps.
‘The Hymn of the North’ feature Chilly Gonzales adding a delicacy with his piano and, as the title suggests, looks at the faded past and pride in the North. It’s a lullaby for grown-ups who never really learned how to rest with a sixties flavour that shifts in tone towards the end into a deliciously overwrought finale.
Final track ‘A Sunset’ lays one down to rest with its plucked strings and scratching violin tickle with the gospel chorus that adds a frisson to Cocker’s laconic style.
There’s a weariness in ‘More’, but also a lightness, a grace. It’s not a comeback album. It’s not a victory lap. It’s a reminder that Pulp have always existed on the edges—of class, of genre, of cool—and that’s exactly where they belong.
Some bands fade; others crystallise into memory. And some, a precious few, feel like they’ve always been playing, just out of earshot. ‘More’ is the sound of Pulp coming back into focus—not to shout, but to remind us why we ever listened in the first place.
‘More’ is out today through Rough Trade/Remote Control Records and available to download and stream here and through the link below.
Other editions of ‘More’ – including a few of the one-off colour vinyl designs hand-picked by Jarvis – are available via the band’s website. If you are looking for a truly immersive experience, the band and Dragonfly Tea have brewed a special Sencha-style green tea – available to order now.
Feature Photograph: Tom Jackson
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