Not a shaman, or a showman, ashamed I was selling the rights
I took a breather, and decided not to ruin my life
I was conforming to a cosmic design
I was playing to type
Until I walked back to the gardеn of earthly delights
You’ve heard correctly! Pulp have returned, prising open a new chapter with More, their first album since 2001’s We Love Life. Cut in a mere three weeks at London’s Orbb Studio last November with producer James Ford, this record moves with a rare immediacy…Jarvis Cocker himself noting it’s the quickest Pulp album ever laid down.
Spike Island, which made its debut during Pulp’s tour in 2024, heralds a promising glimpse: as with most of Pulp’s songs, the poetic lyrics trace a personal reckoning: an artist stepping back from self-destruction and rediscovering purpose not through reason, but raw instinct. Wrestling with fate, regret, and creative compulsion, it pivots from chaos toward clarity. Spike Island – part myth, part memory – echoes the infamous 1990 Stone Roses gathering, where euphoria met ego on a Cheshire floodplain. Jason Buckle was in the thick of it, but Jarvis Cocker caught the aftershocks secondhand, piecing the legend together through cigarette smoke and secondhand tales. Chief among them: the overzealous DJ endlessly howling, “Spike Island, come alive!” like a prophet shouting into a rave-shaped void. The song nods to Pulp’s musical heritage while affirming a renewed sense of direction, framed not by logic or legacy, but by visceral drive.
In short, it is pure magic.
For the Spike Island video, Cocker turned to artificial intelligence, feeding Rankin and Donald’s Different Class inlay photographs into an AI app and following its digital detours. The result is a restless reverie of repurposed portraits, a probing portrait of personhood in the pixel age. Between Ford’s polished production and Cocker’s cunning commentary, More stands as both an echo of Pulp’s past and a bold step into uncharted terrain…proof that sometimes the shortest routes yield the deepest revelations.
“The weekend I began work on the video was a strange time: I went out of the house & 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…..My final thought? H.I. Forever!”
The video is a strange one, no doubt. Surreal, even…seeing those now-iconic photos stirred into an Uncanny Valley daydream, thirty years after they were first taken. The AI generates all manner of oddities: warped fingers, botched buildings, uncanny grins and slow motion. But in true Pulp fashion, it’s served with a wink, a nod, and a knowing smirk. Equal parts absurd, sentimental, and strangely moving…a half-remembered dream laced with digital déjà vu. Grab the tissues.
Watch the video for “Spike Island” below:
More, dedicated to the band’s dearly-departed bassist Steve Mackey, arrives 6 June via Rough Trade, draped in dry wit and widescreen sway, but this time sharpened to a sleeker, steelier edge. Richard Hawley and Jason Buckle each pen one track; the Eno clan lend spectral support on another. Richard Jones scores strings for the Elysian Collective, adding a lush thrum beneath the gloss. Come September, Pulp and LCD Soundsystem will co-command the Hollywood Bowl: two nights of nostalgia, served with smirk and synth, under California skies that once promised everything and delivered disco-drenched existentialism.
Listen to Spike Island below and pre-order More here.
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