Pulp return with More, their first new album in almost 24 years.
“This is the first Pulp album since We Love Life in 2001,” says frontman Jarvis Cocker. ”Yes: the first Pulp album for 24 years… How did that happen?
“When we started touring again in 2023, we practiced a new song called Hymn of the North during soundchecks and eventually played it at the end of our second night at Sheffield Arena. This 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.
“The music for one song was written by Richard Hawley. The music for another was written by Jason Buckle. The Eno family sing backing vocals on a song. There are string arrangements written by Richard Jones and played by the Elysian Collective.
“The album was recorded over three weeks by James Ford in Walthamstow, London, starting on 18 November 2024. This is the shortest amount of time a Pulp album has ever taken to record. It was obviously ready to happen.”
Come Alive
To mark the return, the band has shared new single Spike Island. Featuring a combination of synths, violin and slide guitar, amplified by producer James Ford who also produced the album, the track was inspired by Stone Roses’ infamous Spike Island gig
Lyrically the idea for the track came from Jason Buckle (Relaxed Muscle) who co-wrote the song and went to show. A DJ there shouted, “Spike Island, come alive!” all day, getting on everybody’s nerves. That stuck in Cocker’s mind, inspiring him to write a second song despite not going to the gig.
Watch the video below:
Human Intelligence
“I was told that someone was interested in investigating A.I. and did I have any ideas?,” says Cocker on the video. “The first idea I had was to animate the photographs that Rankin & Donald took for 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 realised that wasn’t going to happen. 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… I have to thank Julian House for some expert post-production work and Rankin & Donald Milne for allowing me to use their work in this way. As it says in text at the end of the video, I think what they did for Pulp back in 1995 was ‘Human Intelligence at its best’.
Ready To Happen
Limited editions of More will be available on vinyl. In addition to a double LP cut at 45rpm, which will be exclusive to Pulp’s online shop and Rough Trade Records’ webstore, there will be four single-disc colour vinyl pressings. Handpicked and named by Jarvis, these include a “Theresa” green LP available across all retail. A “Blue Sky Thinking” Marble LP, is exclusive to independent record stores and a “South Yorkshire Sunset” Marble LPis only available from shops in Sheffield. An “Isha Kriya” ink spot design will be available exclusively from Pulp and Rough Trade Records’ online shops.
Tracklisting
Spike Island
Tina
Grown Ups
Slow Jam
Farmers Market
My Sex
Got To Have Love
Background Noise
Partial Eclipse
The Hymn of the North
A Sunset
More will be released via Rough Trade Records on 6 June. Pre-order here
Read More: Jarvis Cocker narrates liner notes for reissue of The All Seeing I album
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