“I exist to do this,” Jarvis Cocker sings on “Spike Island,” the opening song on More, Pulp’s first album in 24 years. He immediately clarifies what “this” is: “shouting & pointing.” As anyone who has ever seen Jarvis perform knows, he is very good at both. And while he didn’t stop shouting or pointing when Pulp broke up in 2002, those actions carry more purpose with the band that made him famous. The same goes for his songs. His solo work over the last two and a half decades has been good—often great—but it all hits the pleasure centers more directly as part of Pulp.
So what else makes a Pulp record? There are a lot of signature moves, styles, and sounds, and most of them are represented on More, but it’s also more than that. It’s a feeling you can only get from people who have known and played music with each other for a very long time (even if they haven’t done so in a while). Most of the songs on More were tested live during Pulp’s triumphant 2024 North American tour, which signaled that the band weren’t there this time just to play the hits.
With all the songs fully written before going into the studio (a first for Pulp), Jarvis, drummer Nick Banks, guitarist Mark Webber, and keyboardist Candida Doyle banged out the main sessions live with producer James Ford in just three weeks at the end of 2024. (They took a while longer adding strings, backing vocals and more with the band’s augmented lineup.) “This is the shortest amount of time a Pulp album has ever taken to record,” Jarvis said when announcing the album. “It was obviously ready to happen.”
Unlike 1997’s dark hangover-of-the-soul record This Is Hardcore, and 2001’s Scott Walker-produced We Love Life, which closed out the band’s original 23-year run with a pleasant whimper — the two albums that followed their 1995 masterpiece Different Class — there’s an ease, a camaraderie here that is palplable throughout. Jarvis has said that following the death of Pulp bassist and good friend Steve Mackey in 2023 he made a conscious decision to pursue happiness as best he could—which included reuniting with his bandmates. A month into the 2023 tour, they debuted new song “Hymn of the North,” which “seemed to open the floodgates.”
There’s also a sense of fun here that’s been missing from Pulp albums since Different Class and Jarvis and the rest of the band are not afraid to give the people what they want this time. The two most “classic” Pulp songs on the album both originated in the late ’90s but were never finished—Jarvis has suggested they sounded a little too much like Different Class at the time—and they are definite high points here. “Got to Have Love” is one of the group’s signature disco bangers, complete with Jarvis’ fondness for spelling and one of his most explicit couplets ever: “Without love you’re just making a fool of yourself / Without love you’re just jerking off…inside someone else.”
Then there’s “Grown Ups,” which has a very Britpop guitar riff and chorus, not to mention an arched-eyebrow delivery of “are you sure?” straight out of “Common People.” The music and title date from the days of Tony Blair, but the lyrics are new and tie into the album’s (paraphrasing here) “choose happiness wherever you are” theme. In the song, Jarvis recounts a dream where he looked through a telescope and saw people on another planet having a wonderful time. He traveled across space to visit, only to look through a telescope and see everyone back at home having a great time—while he was trapped where he was. “I am not aging,” he sings, “I am just ripening, and life’s too short to drink bad wine.”
The first two-thirds of More are just about flawless and full of patented Pulp-isms: opener “Spike Island” is the album’s other dancefloor-friend cut and is set at The Stone Roses’ infamous 1990 gig that also inspired “Sorted for E’s and Wizz”; “Tina” is another of Jarvis’ songs about a woman (see also: “Disco 2000,” “Sylvia,” “Inside Susan”) but the first to do it flamenco-style; and “Slow Jam” and “My Sex” offer lush, deep-shag funk with Barry White-inspired sexy whispering, making for arguably the two best songs on the album. In another group’s hands, these kinds of callbacks might just feel like fan service, but Cocker & co. recontextualize them through a decidedly middle-aged lens that is still quite horny. Even the cover art is classic Pulp, with the cardboard cutout photos of the band from Different Class placed atop a mountain.
Both “Tina” and “My Sex” probably wouldn’t exist like they do if Cocker hadn’t formed Jarv Is… at the end of the 2010s. Most of that band has been incorporated into the current Pulp lineup, and the playful backing vocals—arranged by violinist Emma Smith and sung by a choir—sound like they’re straight out of Jarv Is’ underappreciated 2020 debut album, one of many musical casualties of the pandemic. They’re also the least Pulp-like parts of the album—Pulp didn’t really do backing vocals until This Is Hardcore, and even then, not like this—but they’re a welcome jolt. While nitpicking: I wish there was more guitar. Mark Webber plays on every song, but the instrument mostly takes a backseat with the glammy leads only rearing their heads a couple times.
The second half of More also suffers a bit from drowsiness; “Background Noise,” “Partial Eclipse,” “Hymn of the North,” and “A Sunset” are all terrific individually, but they’re different shades of autumnal magic-hour folk with wistful strings. “Partial Eclipse” gets a rise thanks to some of Cocker’s calling card double entendres, and “Hymn of the North” (about the band’s Sheffield home) has a sweet Motown/Bacharach string breakdown, but the tail end of the record could use something like “Monday Morning” to raise the blood pressure and BPMs before swaying off gently into “A Sunset.”
That said, it’s hard to imagine a better final song than “A Sunset,” a gorgeous number that ties the album’s themes into a bow with just a little irony, all while cribbing from “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” and featuring Brian Eno and his family on backing vocals. Or for that matter, “Farmer’s Market,” a sunrise kind of song about falling in love late in life that closes Side 1. Only Jarvis could pen something so openly romantic like this and set it in a parking lot.
Both “Farmer’s Market” and “A Sunset” are tales of appreciating where you are right now, going on instinct, and seizing the moment. Pulp did just that with More.
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Order More on sky blue thinking vinyl and dark green vinyl in the BV shop.
