Pulp unveil their first new album in 24 years
Indie icons Pulp have announced a new album, More, and shared their first single in almost 24 years, called Spike Island.
Speaking on BBC 6 Music, frontman Jarvis Cocker said the band had been tempted back into the studio by the overwhelming response to their 2023 reunion tour.
“We did play one new song towards the end of the tour, and nobody threw things at us, or left to go to the bar,” he said. “So we just thought we’d carry on and see what we could conjure up.”
The Sheffield band were one of the biggest acts of the 1990s Britpop era – although their music never quite fit into the backward-looking musical revisionism of that movement – with songs like Babies, Disco 2000 and Common People.
Formed in Sheffield in 1978, they sold more than 10 million records after taking a (very) long road to success.
After 2001’s We Love Life, the band went on a decade-long hiatus. They reformed in 2011 for a number of festival dates, including a surprise performance Glastonbury, and reunited again in 2023.
The new single was inspired by the infamous Stone Roses concert at Spike Island, Widnes, in 1990 – a show that has been variously described as a milestone for British indie music, and a disappointing shambles with dodgy sound.
Pulp guitarist Mark Webber told 6 Music’s Lauren Laverne the show had been “a slight anticlimax, to be honest”.
“I think everyone felt that way,” he said. “There was a lot of anticipation but it didn’t sound very good, it was very windy and the vibe wasn’t there.”
Cocker said he hadn’t been at the show, but had written the lyrics after speaking to various attendees, including musician Jason Buckle, from the band All Seeing I, who co-wrote Pulp’s single.
“All he could remember was a DJ who between every song said, ‘Spike Island come alive, Spike Island come alive‘,” he said.
“That phrase stuck with me. I’ve got a very short attention span I think.”
Cocker said the track was a sister song to 1995’s Sorted for E’s and Whizz, which was also based on a fan’s experience of the Stone Roses’ gig.
The inspiration for that track was “a girl that I was speaking to at The Leadmill in Sheffield one night,” he recalled.
“She said all that she could remember were people going round saying, ‘Is everyone sorted for E’s and whizz?’. So that phrase stuck in my mind.”
More will be released on 6 June, and is dedicated to Pulp’s former bassist Steve Mackey, who died in 2023, at the age of 56.
Cocker said that recording without the musician was “weird at first” but that there were “two songs on the record which date from when Steve was around”, which made him feel part of the project.
“It was not the nicest thing,” the singer continued, “but people who you’re close to, you never forget them, and you can do things to remember them by”.
The album was recorded over three weeks in 2024, and Cocker said there were “no over-riding themes, except feelings, maybe, which sounds very wafty and not very precise”.
He said the absence of an overarching idea had given the band a sense of freedom, compared to more conceptual Pulp albums such as This Is Hardcore.
“We [recorded] it quite quickly, and we were trying to not think about it too much, because that’s what kind of made the last couple of Pulp albums a bit of a pain,” he said.
“It was mainly my fault,” he added, “because I’d never got the lyrics together, so I was always changing them and messing around.
“This time, they were all written before we went into the studio, and I realised it was a lot less stressful.
“You know, I would always be a bit stressed in the studio, because I knew once the music was done, then I had to write the words. I don’t know why I put myself through that,” he said.
Artificial intelligence video
In a press release announcing the record, Cocker added: “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 AI was involved during the process.”
However, he did employ artificial intelligence to create the video for Spike Island, which animates the infamous “cardboard cut-out” figures who appear on the cover of Pulp’s biggest album, Different Class.
“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 & white figure remains still whilst the bus in the background drives off’, which led to [a] sequence where the coach weirdly slides towards the cut-out of me,” said Cocker.
“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.”
After completing the video, the musician said he’d landed firmly on the side of “human intelligence” over AI.
The band will kick off a UK tour the day after the album is released in June but, in response to a 6 Music listener, said they had “no plans” to play Glastonbury.
However, the band do have a gap in their diary for the weekend the festival takes place, before resuming their tour in Spain in July.
Correction: An earlier version of this story said that Pulp were playing in Los Angeles on the weekend of Glastonbury. However, those dates are in September.
