In a year where many are talking about one Britpop band in particular – cough, cough, Oasis – the often-forgotten band of the same era, Pulp, have stolen the limelight with their new album More. Last summer may have been ‘Brat Summer’, but for all you Geek-Chic Radio 4 listening icons out there, this summer is undoubtedly ‘Pulp Summer’.
More is Pulp’s eighth studio album, and their first since 2001’s We Love Life. Even after the long wait, it doesn’t disappoint. Jarvis Cocker and Co have weaved a creatively magnificent, joyfully quirky, and at times delicately loving 50 minutes of listening. I’ve never wanted to buy a pair of thick oversized glasses and dress like an expert off the Antiques Roadshow more than after hearing this record.
The album announces itself with ‘Spike Island’, which was released as a single in April. It’s a tight, groovy, and boisterous track where Cocker’s vocals are, perhaps, at their peak. It’s classic Pulp, but with a new maturity, and it sets the tone for what’s to come.
Songs like ‘Tina’, ‘Grown Ups’, and ‘Got to Have Love’ have a similar typically rousing and playful Pulp guise to them. They stir the inner adolescence in you, just as older Pulp songs like ‘Common People’ or ‘Disco 2000’ do. When listening to songs like ‘Got to Have Love’, you can feel the band just seamlessly slipping back into creating together. One can only imagine it’s like slipping on an old pair of comfortable shoes for them, even after all these years.
The dark and moody Nick Cave-esque track, ‘My Sex’, is noteworthy too, and topical song for 2025. It’s brooding and menacing, but when Cocker sings the lyrics “I haven’t got an agenda / I haven’t even got a gender / my sex is hard to explain”, one can’t help but feel it’s a middle finger to the likes of JK Rowling.
Cocker recently told Jools Holland on the Later… with Jools Holland show that his wife’s favourite song on the album is ‘Farmers Market’. And it’s easy to understand why. It’s delicate and soft and is, perhaps, the band’s most emotional song on the record. It’s a cry in the car song if ever there was one – a nice cry, like a warm hug. Additionally, the use of strings on the track is reminiscent to those which appear on Arctic Monkeys’ The Car album; reasonable, when you realise that both bands used producer James Ford on the respective records. Both bands also have the same Sheffield melancholia feel about their art nowadays too – it must be something in the Yorkshire water.
The track which stands out above the other ten on the album, however, is without a doubt ‘Grown Ups’. It tackles the endless coming-of-age story of man, the maturity process, and how it never concludes for any of us, no matter how old we are. Since, at the end of the day, even fully grown adults are just trying their best to fit in. The song makes you remember that it’s everybody’s first time living, and it’s okay to feel lost, but you should own it when you do. Amongst the lustrous strings and synths falling around him, Cocker’s chorus laments: “Trying so, so hard to act just like a grown up / And it’s so, so hard / And we’re hoping that we don’t get shown up / ‘Cause everybody wants to grow up”.
More is not just the work of a band getting back together for old-time’s sake. It’s the work of a band who’s potentially at the peak of their powers. When one Britpop band prepares to sell out stadiums across the country on nostalgia, playing material they largely wrote over 20 years ago. Another band from the same era is still trying to push the boundaries. That’s just Pulp in a nutshell, and you’ve got to love them for it.
