Amid the recent spate of revivals of British pop and rock music from the 1990s, including Blur’s 2023 album The Ballad of Darren and Oasis’s promised, or threatened, visit to North America’s stadia this summer, the return of the Sheffield act Pulp is the most unexpected and, therefore, the most welcome.

When Jarvis Cocker’s troupe first came to prominence in their native Great Britain in the mid-’90s with His ‘n’ Hers and Different Class, they were offering something conspicuously different from their peers. They boasted both an eclectic selection of musical influences, a mélange of John Barry, Serge Gainsbourg, Roxy Music, and David Bowie, and also featured the most inimitable frontman around.

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Cocker, like Morrissey in the decade before him, was a great British eccentric who nonetheless thrived when it came to being an equally great British pop star. He sang in a strong Yorkshire accent and cultivated a stage presence that often included him reciting near stream-of-consciousness spoken-word monologues in the middle of songs. His lyrics were bitingly witty — “I’ve kissed your mother twice, and now I’m working on your dad”, Cocker’s camp Casanova declared on Different Class’s “Pencil Skirt” — and the often incongruously sumptuous music gave the bedsit dramas depicted an ironically cinematic quality. Imagine a combination of Billy Liar and Gainsbourg’s seminal 1971 album Histoire de Melody Nelson, and you’re coming close to the enduring appeal of the band.

Pulp was a politely regarded curio rather than a mainstream proposition in the United States. Its members went their separate ways in 2001. Their swansong album, the underrated, Scott Walker-produced We Love Life, had a lot of good things about it, but it was out of kilter in the era of The Strokes and The White Stripes. Cocker remained a popular figure in his native Britain, producing decently received solo albums, and Pulp occasionally reformed for live performances. These sold out to a nostalgic crowd eager to hear the band’s best-known song, “Common People,” a scathing satire on poverty tourism which has barely dated in the past three decades. Yet the news that they were returning with their eighth studio album, wryly titled More, still came as a surprise. Would it be a triumphant comeback, or an outmoded embarrassment in the vein of the Stone Roses’ immediately forgotten 2016 singles?

Speaking of the Roses, Pulp owes at least some of its success to that Mancunian band. Famously, it assumed the other act’s headlining spot at Glastonbury in 1995 after the Stone Roses imploded and promptly delivered an epoch-defining set that lifted it to the zenith of the industry. It’s appropriate, then, that More’s first track and lead single, “Spike Island,” pays wry homage to their benefactors. Spike Island, for the uninitiated, was the site of a disastrously poorly organised 1990 Stone Roses concert that has gone on to acquire dubious reverence as “Woodstock for the baggy age.”

Pulp’s eponymous homage to the amphetamine-fueled event has Cocker’s usual self-deprecation — “I was wrestling with a coat hanger, can you guess who won? The universe shrugged, shrugged and moved on” — before it comes as close as any song ever has to exploring the band’s enduring appeal. “I was born to perform, it’s a calling,” he sings. “I exist to do this, shouting and pointing.” It works, beautifully, as a triumphal description of self, leavened with humor.

It is hard to imagine, say, Chris Martin or Dave Grohl coming out with such a declaration. Yet Cocker is no blue jean-wearing everyman. His arch attractiveness, and indeed the reason why More succeeds, is that he is playing the same role, of the velvet-jacketed roué, that he has for the past three decades. But the jacket is now threadbare, the glasses thicker, and the priapic urge frustrated by his prostate playing up.

Like the decadent poet Lord Rochester, who reflected in The Disabled Debauchee that “past joys have more than paid what I endure,” Cocker is long past his prime. It’s therefore heartening to know that Cocker’s very much in on the joke when he sings on “My Sex” that “my sex leaves much to be desired/Spoken of in whispers behind closed doors.” If the earlier albums looked first at the banality of youthful sexual desire, then More consists of the reflections of a man in late middle age. That it’s so fun to join him in his reminiscence suggests that the album, nearly a quarter-century in the making, demonstrates that the old dog has a little life in him yet.

WHEN ‘THE SHINING’ WAS OVERLOOKED

Pulp has always been predominantly the Jarvis Cocker show, and the death of bassist Steve Mackey in 2023 removed perhaps his most significant musical collaborator. Sonically, this is a pleasing mishmash of different eras of the band all yoked together. There is something of We Love Life’s Walker-influenced grandiosity in the widescreen closing tracks, “The Hymn of the North” and “A Sunset,” just as the grumbling nastiness of This Is Hardcore returns for “Slow Jam” and “My Sex.” If you’re one of the true believers who got into the band with His ‘n’ Hers, then the London Calling-esque stomp of Grown Ups will transport you, once again, to the glory days of 1994, when, as Cocker once sang, “life could have been very different.”

This is an album drenched in nostalgia, but it’s also one that earns its place in 2025. I didn’t love it in the way I relished Pulp’s musical heyday, but it’s a damn sight better than most reunion cash-ins. I can’t imagine that it will be the record that brings Pulp to mainstream recognition in the U.S., but that, you imagine, suits Cocker et al just fine. They have made their names on being the wry outsiders, forever looking in at the shenanigans of those superficially more successful than them, and offering witty denigration of their antics. The fact that Pulp is still here, still producing something as enjoyably arch as More, is a testament to the old adage that living well really is the best revenge.

Alexander Larman is the author of, most recently, The Windsors at War and an editor at Spectator World.