Pulp announces first album in nearly 24 years
The record, appropriately titled More, releases on June 6.
Photo: Tom Jackson
Pulp is giving fans More. That’s both an exciting update and the name of the band’s first record in nearly 24 years. Their last, We Love Life, was released back in 2001.
In a statement, frontman Jarvis Cocker shared that the album came together quickly after the band started touring again in 2023. “The Hymn Of The North,” a new song, “seemed to open the floodgates” and the band wrote the rest of the album in the first half of 2024. Recorded over three weeks “by four human beings from the North of England, aided & abetted by five other human beings from various locations in the British Isles,” More took the shortest time of any Pulp album to record. “It was obviously ready to happen,” Cocker wrote, with an added note that “no A.I. was involved during the process.”
Cocker is taking a hard stance against the controversial technology by… using it to create the music video for the album’s leading single, “Spike Island.” The logic may be a bit silly, but his heart is in the right place. The video features photos of the band from 30 years ago that Cocker made “come alive”—badly—by using A.I. He expresses his doubt with a bunch of literal question marks superimposed on the uncanny renderings throughout the clip, before ending with a mission statement: “Maybe we need to work on other ways of coming alive?” The video also thanks Rankin and Donald Milne, who captured the original 1995 photos: “Human intelligence at its best.”
