Pulp
More
ROUGH TRADE
If you’re coming into the saga of Pulp late in the game, the Sheffield art rock ensemble beloved for Jarvis Cocker’s martini-dry piquant vocals and updated Noel-Coward-in-a-leather-bar lyricism started in 1978, were all the rage during the Blur/Oasis Britpop era with His 'n' Hers (1994), Different Class (1995) and This Is Hardcore (1998), broke up, came back, disappeared, and returned again in time for 2025’s More.
Working class by way of its "to the manner born" Sheffield-steeliness, Cocker & Co. still, across More, extoll the virtues and vices of classholism on the genuinely lovely “Hymn of the North,” and the laid-instate-sentimentalism of “Background Noise.” With that, Pulp maintains its Kinks-y kitchen sink dramatics in opposition to Oasis’ Beatles-like demeanor and Blur’s operatic Who-ness, especially on the mess-in-a-dress everything-ness of “Spike Island,” the most curious and contagious track on the new album.
Where More differs, however, from the past albums of Pulp—still with Cocker, Candida Doyle, Mark Webber and Nick Banks as its core—is that age, or rather aging, or rather maturity have become part of its thesis statements. Rather than live beyond his means, there is a newly found vulnerability and pragmatism to Cocker’s still showy storytelling. Boosted by the booming, equally theatrical production of James Ford in windswept strings-and-synths mode, the glory blazing “Grown Ups” with its “I am not aging/no, I am just ripening” mind-set, and the dear, swinging London sophisticates of “Got to Have Love” and “Tina” place romanticism above all while marching into an uncertain future. Pulp even manages to take the ambiguity of love, age and sage wisdom into the sunset of More with, what else, a stunningly end-credit last song (titled “A Sunset”) that touches on making the most of the life we have before time all comes to a crashing finale. How lovely it is that Cocker & Co, throughout the whole of the sheerly marvelous More, have come to such literal and figurative conclusions at this not-so-late stage of their game.
