Pulp Prepare First Album Since 2001

U.K. rock veterans Pulp will return June 6 with their first album since 2001’s We Love Life in the form of the 11-track More, which is led by the single “Spike Island.”

The track was written by frontman Jarvis Cocker’s Relaxed Muscle bandmate Jason Buckle and includes contributions from James Ford, who produced the full album. More was recorded at London’s Orbb Studio and will be available in a variety of special vinyl pressings, including two marble versions, a green LP and an ink spot design.

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Pulp went nine years without performing between 2002-2011 and in 2023 broke another 10-year hiatus by going back on tour. Cocker says the band was inspired by the new song “Hymns of the North,” which “seemed to open the floodgates: we came up with the rest of the songs on this album during the first half of 2024. A couple are revivals of ideas from last century.”

Other artists featured on More included Richard Hawley, who wrote the music for an as-yet-unidentified song, unspecified members of the Briano Eno family on backing vocals and the Elysian Collective performing string arrangements by Richard Jones. The three-week recording period was “the shortest amount of time a Pulp album has ever taken to record. It was obviously ready to happen,” Cocker says. “These are the facts. We hope you enjoy the music. It was written and performed by four human beings from the north of England, aided and abetted by five other human beings from various locations in the British Isles. No A.I. was involved during the process.”

More is dedicated to Pulp bassist Steve Mackey, who died in 2023. “This is the best that we can do,” Cocker adds. “Thanks for listening.”

As for the “Spike Island” video, Cocker reveals, “I was told that someone was interested in investigating A.I. and did I have any ideas? The first idea I had was to animate the photographs that Rankin & Donald took for [the album] Different Class: after all, back in 1995 they had been an ‘artificial’ way of dropping us into real-life situations and getting an album cover done whilst we were too busy recording the music for that album to pose for pictures. No brainer.”

“It was my initial idea to produce a kind of ‘making of’ video that showed how the photos had come to be taken — but as soon as I fed the first shot into the A.I. app, I realized that wasn’t going to happen,” he continues. “So I decided to ‘go with the flow’ and see where the computer led me. All the moving images featured in the video are the result of me feeding in a still image and then typing in a ‘prompt’ such as: ‘the black and white figure remains still whilst the bus in the background drives off,’ which led to the sequence where the coach weirdly slides towards the cut-out of me. The weekend I began work on the video was a strange time: I went out of the house and kept expecting weird transformations of the surrounding environment due to the images the computer had been generating. The experience had marked me. I don’t know whether I’ve recovered yet.”

Pulp will support More with a handful of summer tour dates in the U.K. and Ireland, beginning June 7 in Glasgow. The band’s only North American shows at the moment are Sept. 25-26 at Los Angeles’ Hollywood Bowl with LCD Soundsystem.

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