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Apr 10, 2025 By Mark Redfern Photography by Tom Jackson

Britpop legends Pulp have announced More, their first new album in 24 years, and shared its first single, “Spike Island,” via a music video. It’s disco 2025, as the new album is due out June 6 via Rough Trade. The band’s frontman Jarvis Cocker directed the AI-assisted “Spike Island” video, which attempts to bring photos from the band’s Different Class-era to life, sometimes to amusing results. Watch it below, followed by the album’s tracklist and cover artwork, as well as the band’s upcoming tour dates.

Pulp’s last album was the Scott Walker-produced We Love Life, released in 2001. Since then the band went on hiatus, reissued their old albums, returned to touring from 2011-2013, put out the unreleased song “After You” in 2013, went back on hiatus, and reunited again in 2022 for a well-received tour that stretched from 2023 to 2024. The band’s bassist Steve Mackey sadly died in March 2023 at only 56, so he did not take part in the last reunion or the new album. Cocker also released several solo and collaborative albums, as well as guesting on various tracks by other musicians (including Air and Hot Chip) and collaborating with filmmaker Wes Anderson on songs for some of his movies. In 2019 Cocker formed the new band JARV IS… and released the 2020 album Beyond the Pale (it was one of our Top 100 Albums of 2020).

James Ford (Arctic Monkeys, Fontaines D.C.) produced More, which was recorded at Orbb Studio in East London. Pulp’s main lineup is Cocker, Candida Doyle, Nick Banks, and Mark Webber. Pulp formed way back in 1978 when Cocker was only 15 years old, but they didn’t hit it big until the 1990s when they became one of the centerpiece bands of the Britpop movement alongside Blur, Oasis, and Suede and had iconic hit songs such as “Common People,” “Sorted for E’s & Wizz,” “Mis-Shapes,” “Babies,” “Do You Remember the First Time?,” “Disco 2000,” and “This Is Hardcore.” Doyle has been with the band since 1984, Banks since 1986, and Webber since 1995 (before that he was the president of Pulp’s fanclub). The new album features various other collaborators, as detailed by Cocker below.

“Spike Island” was inspired by the infamous Stone Roses concert of the same name in 1990. Cocker’s collaborator in the Relaxed Muscle side-project, Jason Buckle, co-wrote the song with Cocker. Apparently a DJ at the event repeatedly shouted all day the phrase: “Spike Island, come alive!” This got on everybody’s nerves and inspired Cocker to write the song, even though he didn’t actually go to the Spike Island concert. Pulp’s 1995 hit “Sorted for E’s & Wizz,” from Different Class, was also inspired by the Spike Island concert.

In a press release, Cocker had this to say about the “Spike Island” video:

“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 and Donald [Milne] 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 & 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 and 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.’

“My final thought? H.I. Forever!”

Cocker also had this to say about the new album: “This is the first Pulp album since We Love Life in 2001. Yes: the first Pulp album for 24 years.

“How did that happen?

“Well: 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 November 18th, 2024. This is the shortest amount of time a Pulp album has ever taken to record. It was obviously ready to happen.

“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 & abetted by five other human beings from various locations in the British Isles. No A.I. was involved during the process.

“This album is dedicated to Steve Mackey.

“This is the best that we can do.

“Thanks for listening.”

Read our tribute to Steve Mackey.

Read our interview with Cocker on JARV IS… and Beyond the Pale.

Read our 2017 print magazine article on Cocker and Chilly Gonzales’ Room 29 album.

Read our 2017 extended Q&A with Cocker on Room 29.

Read our 2009 cover story interview with Cocker on his second solo album Further Complications.

Read our 2007 interview with Cocker on his debut solo album Jarvis.

More Tracklist:

1. Spike Island
2. Tina
3. Grown Ups
4. Slow Jam
5. Farmers Market
6. My Sex
7. Got to Have Love
8. Background Noise
9. Partial Eclipse
10. The Hymn of the North
11. A Sunset

Pulp Tour Dates:

June 7 – Glasgow, UK @ OVO Hydro
June 10 – Dublin, IE @ 3Arena
June 13 - London,UK @ The O2 SOLD OUT
June 14 – London,UK @ The O2 SOLD OUT
June 19 – Birmingham,UK @ Utilita Arena
June 21 – Manchester,UK @ Co-op Live
July 25 – Sheffield,UK @ Tramlines Festival
Sept 25 - Los Angeles, CA @ Hollywood Bowl^
Sept 26 - Los Angeles, CA @ Hollywood Bowl^

^ = w/ LCD Soundsystem

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