The New Yorker:

The Pulp singer on conquering his fear of nature, the pleasures and perils of art and aging, and the band’s first new album in twenty-four years.

By Sarah Larson

This month, the beloved British pop band Pulp will release “More,” its first new album in twenty-four years. Jarvis Cocker, the band’s founder, lyricist, and front man, has engaged in innumerable interesting projects in the meantime—an album with his band Jarv Is, collaborations with Wes Anderson and Chilly Gonzales, a BBC radio program, an excellent memoir, “Good Pop Bad Pop”—but the new Pulp record feels like a significant return, triumphant and humble at once. Its first song, “Spike Island,” establishes a friendly, self-deprecating tone (“I exist / To do this: / Shouting & pointing,” Cocker sings) and the rest is full of Cocker’s signature motifs—half-serious spoken-word amusement, playful imagery—warmly suited to life in 2025. (“Please stay in touch with me / In this contactless society.”) On “Grown Ups,” he mentions life being about the journey, not the destination, and asks, “But what if you get travel sick / Before you’ve even left the station?” Elsewhere, he sings, “Instead of having us this Slow Death / We should be having us a Slow Jam.” At their best, Cocker’s songs can feel like a shared groove, with dancing as good an answer as any to life’s joys and befuddlements.

Cocker grew up in Sheffield, in north-central England, with his mother and sister; his father left when Jarvis was seven. He formed the first incarnation of Pulp at fifteen. He gave a demo tape to John Peel, the legendary British broadcaster and tastemaker, at a local event; Peel’s producer called two weeks later, and Pulp was off to the races. After releasing a couple of albums in the eighties, the band became hugely popular in the nineties, amid Britpop, owing to its catchy melodies, danceable rhythms, and Cocker’s sly, funny, sharply observant lyrics, with themes of class consciousness, sex, and the gentle absurdities of the human condition—all of which reached an apotheosis in the song “Common People,” which turned into an anthem. Pulp’s celebrity became uncomfortable for Cocker in the late nineties, and the band went on hiatus in 2002. They’ve toured occasionally since, notably in 2012, when a farewell show in Sheffield was documented in the 2014 movie “Pulp: A Film About Life, Death, and Supermarkets.”

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