Jarvis and co. are back with their first album in nearly a quarter of a century this June.
More is released on Rough Trade on June 6th, and the news is heralded with a new single and video for ‘Spike Island’
The band previously announced UK dates and an Irish one at 3Arena this June.
The album was recorded with James Ford in London, and the single ‘Spike Island’ came from Jason Buckle (Relaxed Muscle) who co-wrote the song and went to Stone Roses’ infamous Spike Island gig.
A DJ there shouted, “Spike Island, come alive!” all day, getting on everybody’s nerves. That stuck in Jarvis Cocker’s mind, inspiring him to write a second song about Spike Island despite not going to the gig.
The video is the second AI one of the week after Stereolab who announced their first album in 15 years, this time using photos from the artwork from A Different Class by Rankin & Donald. Not a trend I’m thrilled about as the telltale signs of the artificiality are plainly seen.
Of the AI video Jarvis says:
“I was told that someone was interested in investigating A.I. & did I have any ideas? The first idea I had was to animate the photographs that Rankin & Donald took for Different Class: after all, back in 1995 they had been an “artificial” way of dropping us into real-life situations & getting an album cover done whilst we were too busy recording the music for that album to pose for pictures. No brainer.
It was my initial idea to produce a kind of “making of” video that showed how the photos had come to be taken – but as soon as I fed the first shot into the A.I. app I realised that wasn’t going to happen. So I decided to “go with the flow” & see where the computer led me. All the moving images featured in the video are the result of me feeding in a still image & then typing in a “prompt” such as: “The black & white figure remains still whilst the bus in the background drives off” which led to the sequence where the coach weirdly slides towards the cut-out of me.
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…..
I have to thank Julian House for some expert post-production work & Rankin & Donald Milne for allowing me to use their work in this way. As it says in text at the end of the video, I think what they did for Pulp back in 1995 was “Human Intelligence at its best”. My final thought? H.I. Forever!”
Jarvis says on the album:
“This is the first Pulp album since “We Love Life” in 2001. Yes: the first Pulp album for 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.
Album tracklisting:
- Spike Island
- Tina
- Grown Ups
- Slow Jam
- Farmers Market
- My Sex
- Got To Have Love
- Background Noise
- Partial Eclipse
- The Hymn of the North
- A Sunset
Album pre-order
Limited editions of the album will be available on vinyl. Along with a double LP cut at 45 rpm, which will be exclusive to Pulp’s online shop and Rough Trade Records’ webstore, there will also be four single-disc colour vinyl pressings that have been both handpicked and named by Jarvis Cocker personally. Alongside the black LP there will also be a “Theresa” green LP available across all retail, a “Blue Sky Thinking” Marble LP, exclusive to independent record stores, a “South Yorkshire Sunset” Marble LP available only from shops in Sheffield and “Isha Kriya”, an ink spot design, available exclusively from Pulp and Rough Trade Records’ online shops.
