On ‘More’, Pulp pick up precisely where their imperial phase left off

Did anybody really think there wouldn’t be an encore? The Britpop-straddling Pulp of His ’n’ Hers (1994), Different Class (1995) and This is Hardcore (1998) was a phenomenon 15 years in the making, and their bowing out after 2001’s pastoral, Scott Walker-produced seventh album We Love Life felt woefully premature. A 2011 reunion produced a sole new single (2013’s lascivious future disco “After You”) but there was an innate crowd-pleasing impulse in the band that wouldn’t be so easily satiated. “I was born to perform, it’s a calling,” Jarvis Cocker declares early on More, Pulp’s first album in 24 years, breathing second life into their most recent comeback, “I exist to do this, shouting and pointing”. And to that a hearty “alriiiiight”.

As if out to trick naive reviewers into the fatal career bear pit known as “the Ronseal gag”, More initially appears to live up to its name. It draws from leftover songs and life experiences dating back to 1998 and continues precisely where their imperial phase left off. Opener and first single “Spike Island” – a co-write with Cocker’s one-time Relaxed Muscle cohort Jason Buckle, who was there – is as Pulp as it gets. A major event in Nineties rock and dance culture, viewed from an intelligent outsider’s distance, “Spike Island” illuminates Cocker’s existential malaise, as outlined in breathy spoken-word asides between enthusiastic groove-outs. And if it acts as a pill-popping cousin to “Sorted For E’s and Whizz”, it could also be read as a document of the times: “I took a breather and decided not to ruin my life/ I was conforming to a cosmic design/ I was playing to type,” Cocker reminisces, concluding: “This time I’ll get it right”.

“Tina” follows up with more reassuring Pulpisms. Essentially a 1960s Scott Walker gig on Virgin Island, it finds a young and lovelorn Cocker obsessed with a girl around town he’s never had the courage to approach. Obviously that hasn’t stopped him from buying a ring for their imaginary wedding and fantasising about “screwing in a charity shop… the smell of digestive biscuits in the air.” As “Grown Ups” then arrives with a vaudevillian Britpop bounce and a kitchen sink tale of being “let out of the home” as a confused teenager for Christmas 1985, the album threatens to slide into shameless nostalgic regurgitation. But we’re smartly wrongfooted. Midway through, the song evolves into a meditation on the futile frustrations of pining for other life stages, embodied in a dream metaphor of a distant party planet we reach only to find the real rave-up seems to be happening on the one we left behind.

Thus, More accomplishes in just three songs the transition between fan-settling familiarity and creative advancement. Soon, “Slow Jam” and “My Sex” are exploring low-slung, orchestrally emboldened noir-funk in the style of Peter Gabriel, the latter infused with both spooky choirs and Cocker’s trademark priapic prowl. “Lovers’ tiff” is inevitably rhymed with “lover stiff”. “Farmer’s Market” is something of a Cotswolds “Common People” (two life-beaten loners find love over misshapen organic carrots in a car park) but rendered in the subtle and sumptuous tones of both Walker and The National. “Background Noise” drenches a classic Wall of Sound big ballad – very much in producer James Ford’s wheelhouse – in celestial sonics. “Got to Have Love” is galloping, Metronomy-style dream disco building to a Wild West finale as Cocker excitedly hymns that most emancipating emotion, from its sex-enhancing properties (“without love you’re just jerking off inside someone else”) to its inescapable necessity (“say it, you ponce”).

More, then, represents not just the slaking of pent-up thirst for new music but an expansion of the mature Pulp potential – post-struggle, post-breakthrough, post-celebrity and post-drug comedown – that was only scratched at on We Love Life. It ends with a trio of tracks promising vast textural territories the band are yet capable of making home. “Partial Eclipse” billows from bedsit chamber lament to profound space chorale. “Hymn of the North”, an open letter to Cocker’s son as he approached the edge of the nest, swoops low over Yorkshire’s industrial wasteland on swells of spectral space echo and semi-operatic horns. “A Sunset”, co-written with Richard Hawley and featuring a choir of Brian Eno’s family, finds this most bombastic of Britpop bands exploring, wonderfully, the mandolin minimalism of The Magnetic Fields. Is this the way they say Pulp’s future’s meant to feel? If so, MORE.