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WORDS FROM JARVIS ON “MORE”

“This is the first Pulp album since “We Love Life” in 2001. Yes: the first Pulp album for almost 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 & 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 & played by the Elysian Collective.

The album was recorded over 3 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 & 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.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: Imagine a band returning to the fray twenty three years after their last album and then actually making a record that’s right up there with the very best of their material, a record as melodic and pertinent as anything they’d ever done before? Well that band is Pulp!

Music is of course about people, and when I think of Pulp I immediately think of my dear friend and their biggest fan Joseph, from the wondrous book shop and cafe Novel in (appropriately enough) Sheffield; what would he say about Pulp’s comeback? Perhaps he would mention something about them sounding more mature with less bedroom voyeurism whilst retaining the playful edge with which they made their name? Joey would probably find that a tad cheesy but then I’d have to remind him of the famous Elvis Costello quote which was something along the lines of “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”.

Emboldened, I am pretty sure that Joe would continue by saying that it basically reminded him of their album ‘We Love Life’ and that it feels like the next stage of “growing up”. Where that album was about acceptance of themselves after ‘This Is Hardcore’, this one is all about accepting love. He would probably say that Jarvis is now singing about love in a way that sounds more like birds in your garden but without the climbing into bedroom windows of old; it’s more reflective and has moved away from the immediate moments of intimacy and instead focuses on reflections on intimacy in solitude. Is there still room for the classic “song to a mystery woman” that harks back to “Sylvia”? In “Tina”, Joe would say there certainly was! I would then thank Joe and probably end with my trademark; it’s a classic! That’s if any of the above actually happened at all.

TRACK LISTING

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