Pulp Play the Hits and Sweeten the Misses on Comeback Record More

In fact, following the rapturously received tours the band went on last year, it’s never been more clear that Pulp are, by design, of every moment. Listening to Separations or His ‘n’ Hers, those albums still sound like the ugliness and ennui of my current age, as they were when Cocker was the same age. Each of those songs is the tears you shed outside a dingy bar with cheap eyeshadow smudged across your face, as well as the bitchy remark you make to your friends when you’ve dabbed your eyes and walked back inside, ready to forge ahead with the night. It’s a healthy sense of skepticism you feel during the night which fully envelopes you the morning after, though you still beg a higher power to relive the whole thing again when it’s over. They are, fittingly with the title of the new record, the sound of the search for more, as well as the nagging feeling that you’ll never get it—though it might still be worth trying.

Unlike the aforementioned Brothers Gallagher, Pulp have never promised the adrenaline rush of escapism without keeping one foot planted on solid concrete. Even the grandiose dread of This is Hardcore—admittedly, my personal favorite of the band’s records—has moments of startling realism, breaking with the whirl of the fame machine for a thirty-something Cocker to remind us that his age and his circumstances as a suddenly famous musician are intertwined. Accordingly, when people ask those questions (Why me? Why you? Why here? Why now?) about a new Pulp record now, the answer is pretty simple: Jarvis Cocker, Nick Banks, Candida Doyle, and Mark Webber have not made a new album as a unit in 24 years, and it’s time to hear what their current age sounds like.

The other reason is that Jarvis Cocker—following the death of longtime Pulp member Steve Mackey in 2023 and of Cocker’s mother, who raised him and his sister on her own, early last year—has come to let us know that, in his own words, “you are still alive, and that you still have an opportunity to create” in the face of tragedy. As I reviewed the Cure’s Songs of a Lost World, a very different kind of “comeback” record dealing with the passing of time, late last year, it’s fascinating to compare how indicative each of these albums are of either beloved band who made them. Where Robert Smith’s instinct is to pen odes to a crumbling world around him, fearing his own mortality in lush greyscale, Cocker chooses a sense of earnestness over defeat. It’s like you can hear him rolling his eyes at the formality of cleverness he’d employed in his youth. “Learn to say it with a straight face,” he demands on More’s “Got to Have Love,” finally embracing the same concept he seemed so puzzled by on Different Class. Of course, these forthright revelations are still peppered with lines only he could write (Could “Without love, you’re just jerking off inside someone else” have sprung from anyone else’s pen? It’s doubtful.) which ease the tension, like an old friend cracking a joke before you’ve stared your mortality down for too long.

Recording the tracks over a shockingly efficient three-week period with superproducer James Ford, and bolstered by members of Cocker’s post-Pulp solo endeavor JARV IS…, the band’s north-star themes have stayed in place, spinning tales of life, death, and supermarkets into a four-on-the-floor beat. Yet, it’s set to the tune of these band members currently living through their sixties, meaning the tempos trend slower, and the lyrics will occasionally ramble more, even in their directness. The anthemic moments push hard on their hooks, as if they realize they only have so much more time left to broadcast them. The moments these songs chronicle are small—meeting someone in a parking lot, remembering the shirt someone you passed on the street wore, the last time a lover looked at you—but nevertheless, they tell stories of connection. It’s a worthy entry into Pulp’s library of kitchen sink stories, draping real life in sweeping orchestration and thrilling summonses to the dancefloor. In short, if you love any of the jagged elements which make up this art project called Pulp, you will find something to love on More.

The record’s most insistent, stirring moments came fittingly with its two advance singles, as the existential, propulsive “Spike Island” did the heavy lifting of reassuring any fans worried about the quality of a new record after so long away right off the bat. It’s an undeniable pop song-cum-pep-talk, seeing Cocker promise himself that “this time, I’ll get it right,” though he makes sure to remind us of the same fact in turn, in case we still hold any reservations. “I was born to perform, it’s a calling,” he intones, before adding a self-deprecating shrug, like he’s caught himself with his feet not touching the ground, “I exist to do this: shouting and pointing.” By the time he’s backed by the galloping thump of “Got to Have Love,” he’s fully locked into barn-burner mode, and you can envision the way he will shout and point to its groove, as only he can. “My Sex,” an album track which the band also debuted on tour last year, feels apiece with the singles as it slinks over searing guitar lines and near-spectral backing vocals. It winks as much as peak-popularity-Pulp in their most playful moments: “My sex Is an urban myth / A lovers’ tiff or a lover stiff / I haven’t got an agenda / I haven’t even got a gender.”

Yet, the most satisfying stretch of the record begins with the trotting shuffle of “Tina,” an ode to seemingly every woman Cocker has been intrigued by but never approached, which builds a galaxy around quotidian observations on a commute, as the best Pulp songs do. Strings swell as a group of backing vocals sigh that given name after Cocker calls it out, as if they’re playing the role of the last remnant of her scent when she gets off the train at her stop. From there, “Grown Ups” sprawls in a Kinksian shuffle which the band’s musicians expertly rise to and retreat from over rambling spoken word verses, panicking to make sense of adult life’s chaos—no more linear than childhood, only supplanted with new concerns and obsessions.

The moody “Slow Jam,” driven by a hiccuping bassline and comparing a rotting relationship to Christ’s crucifixion, followed by the swooning “Farmer’s Market,” which emerges as one of Pulp’s all-time strongest ballads in its retelling of Cocker’s first meeting with his wife, round out a four-track reminder of why I waited in that show queue last fall. In four distinct modes of expression, the band packs so much personality and specificity into every second of the work that you can’t help but find yourself bewitched. Even when writing from personal experience, they continue to be such staunch witnesses of humanity and what makes it tick. I think of pre-breakthrough b-sides like “Inside Susan” or the devastating bombast of Hardcore’s “Sylvia” and it strikes me how lived-in and lifelike these characters always feel, shaped only by Cocker’s description of how they reach desperately for something outside themselves. In stature, these tracks on More stand alongside both those more insular character studies and the raucous singalongs which will surely make the cut for tour setlists. When I hear “Grown Ups” alongside “Disco 2000” or “Babies” at Forest Hills Stadium this year, I have no doubt the new track will feel seamless in that lineup, and perhaps even be received with a similar level of enthusiasm.

The final run of songs in the tracklist slows the pace considerably, preferring a more languid pace to let Cocker’s vocals stretch out over the record’s thoughtful arrangements. Admittedly, placed in sequence, there’s a slight but palpable lag in the momentum the rest of the running order had worked to keep up—though “Partial Eclipse” and “Hymn of the North” (which features Brian Eno and his family on backing vocals) each build to earned crescendos that break the streak up in a refreshing way. On their own, and with time, I’m sure these tracks will reveal idiosyncrasies I will come to cherish.

After all, the Tao of Pulp is not one of sweeping epics or emotionally wrought missives from the mountaintops, signaling the end of something—and it’s never tried to be. This same man told us himself, in song, that he’s not Jesus, so don’t let the matching initials fool you. More is the sound of life moving on, of time eroding us beautifully, and the miracles we’re lucky enough to have whack us in the face in the course of a day. Every moment is a moment for Pulp to sing for, and More meets them—and us—where we all are. Let’s pick another year to meet up soon.

Elise Soutar is a New York-born-and-based music and culture writer.