Pulp—More [2025]
The beloved Britpop band returns with their first album in nearly 25 years.
Pulp—More [2025]
More is a curiously unassuming, almost perfunctory album title for Pulp, a band that specialized in sweeping manifestos during their '90s prime. It's a verbal shrug, a way for a beloved band to deliberately reset expectations as they return with their first record in nearly a quarter century.
The passing of time hangs heavily over More. The album opens with lead singer Jarvis Cocker strolling down memory lane on "Spike Island," a song that nods at the landmark 1990 Stone Roses concert that laid the groundwork for Britpop, the movement that made Pulp stars in the UK and cult figures in the US. Not much later, the album unveils "Grownups," an epic where Cocker spends six minutes wrestling with the fact that "Everybody's got to grow up," an assertion he counters by drawling "are you sure," just as he did on Pulp's breakthrough single "Common People" thirty years ago.
Cocker's wink at his audience acknowledges that growing up hasn't been particularly easy for him, which is a bit ironic because Pulp always seemed more sophisticated than any of their Britpop peers. They arrived in the UK pop charts in the mid-'90s after spending the 1980s dabbling in goth and folk-inflected indie, cultivating an aptitude for cinematic textures and storytelling that would eventually heighten and deepen their vibrant pop-art. Hooks and rhythms were afterthoughts until acid house radicalized and revitalized Pulp, a shift that coincided with bassist Steve Mackey joining a lineup that coalesced in the mid-80s around Cocker, keyboardist Candida Doyle and drummer Nick Banks.
Mackey remained a crucial collaborator for Cocker during the 21st Century, appearing on various Jarvis projects through Beyond the Pale in 2020. His 2023 death provided the impetus for More; his passing reminded Cocker of the value of creating something new. Jarvis reconvened the band—Doyle, Banks, and guitarist Mark Webber, who joined in the heady Different Class days; violinist/guitarist Russell Senior remains retired—and led Pulp into the studio with Arctic Monkeys producer James Ford, winding up with a complete album within three weeks.
Ford also helmed The Ballad of Darren, the elegiac 2023 comeback from Blur, which frequently rhymes with More, particularly in how both records capture a band who has no interest in acting younger than their advancing years. Moving at a deliberately slower gait, Pulp appears singularly disinterested in modern music, a distinct shift in perspective for a band that spent their glory days reveling in the detritus of pop culture. Whenever the tempo shifts upwards, it's as if they're commenting on the distance between the present and past: there's a melancholy undercurrent lurking within the new wave throb of "Spike Island" and there's not a hint of irony in "Got to Have Love," whose discofied hall of mirrors amplifies its sincerity.
Pulp eased toward unguarded moments on We Love Life, the 2001 album that served first as a farewell to Britpop and, eventually, the world at large. Age has intensified Cocker's vulnerability, allowing him to embrace love in its various forms and letting him acknowledge loss without getting lost in grief. He retains a sharp sense of humor, peppering his extended lyrical flights with self-deprecating barbs which sometimes sting in their precision: "We thought we were just joking trying dreams on for size/We never realized we'd be stuck with them for the rest of our natural lives."
In some senses, More represents Cocker coming to terms with the fact that he's stuck with Pulp, the dream he tried on as a teenager in the early 1980s. After years of wandering, he's returned home, playing with musicians who are attuned to his obsessions. Doyle and Webber's intertwined keyboard and guitars reflect Cocker's internal melodrama while Banks gives them a spine. That interplay is at the heart of More, an album that bypasses the tart pop tunes of Pulp's Britpop days for moody spoken-sung excursions that recall the messier moments of His 'N' Hers. It's not so much a revival as a reconnection, the sound of a band joyously rediscovering themselves.