Jarvis Cocker on if Pulp have more new music in them: “Hopefully not in another 24 years”

Jarvis Cocker has spoken to NME about whether Pulp will make any more new music, after releasing their first album in 24 years.

• READ MORE: Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker: “This is like going back to when you start a band”

The Sheffield band shared their long-awaited eighth studio record, ‘More’, last Friday (June 6), following on from 2001’s ‘We Love Life’. Produced by James Ford, the comeback LP contains the singles ‘Spike Island’ and ‘Got To Have Love’.

It was preceded by the 2013 standalone single ‘After You’, helmed by LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy. ‘More’ also followed the death of Pulp’s Steve Mackey in 2023, and the group’s signing with Rough Trade last year.

During an interview with NME about ‘More’, Cocker was asked if fans could expect yet another Pulp album in the future. “Maybe,” the frontman responded.

“We tried to not have a concept for this record or think, ‘This is it, this is our last gas’. I used to think that a lot. I had this weird thing that when an album was mixed and finished where I’d think, ‘Oh, I can die now and it would be OK’.”

Cocker continued: “That’s a terrible way to think about your life, really. I didn’t feel that with this record. On the sleeve inside it says, ‘This is the best that we can do’. That’s all you can do at any point of your life.”

The singer-songwriter went on to suggest that if a new LP did materialise, it would likely arrive sooner rather than later.

“Hopefully not in another 24 years, but maybe in a couple of years, there will be something else to say,” Cocker told NME.

Pulp had debuted some of the songs that would end up featuring on ‘More’ during their live shows in 2024. These included ‘Farmers Market’, ‘Spike Island’, ‘My Sex’, and ‘Got To Have Love’. Cocker and co. had reunited the previous year for their first gigs together since 2012.

When asked by NME to recall the point he realised Pulp were making a new full-length album, the singer replied: “At the back of my mind, I thought that it could be good to do a record, but I didn’t want to scare everybody off by saying that because the last two Pulp albums took a very long time – mostly due to my prevarication.

“I didn’t want everybody to get stressed out thinking that they were going to lose two years of their lives to make a record. I decided to be grown up and write the words first and things like that, which sped the whole process up a bit.

Cocker went on: “It was kind of like going back to the early days of being in the band when we didn’t have a record deal or anything like that. There was no reason to make this album in that there was nobody asking us to, but we just thought, ‘We’ve got some songs here that are good, so why don’t we record them?’”

Elsewhere in the conversation, he opened up about the loss of Mackey, revealed why he has “always hated” the term ‘Britpop’, and spoke about whether he’d be attending any of Oasis‘ reunion shows. Read the interview in full here.

In a four-star review of ‘More’, NME wrote: “Pulp have retained their original spirit and flair into a statement of middle age without feeling any less vital”.

The group are currently showcasing the album on a UK and Ireland headline tour, which kicked off in Glasgow last Saturday (June 7). Find any remaining tickets here.

In other news, Pulp are currently rumoured to be returning to Glastonbury later this month to play a secret set under the cryptic alias ‘Patchwork’. If the band do show up on the Pyramid Stage, the performance will coincide with the 30th anniversary of their Glasto headline slot in 1995.

Giving a possible clue in a recent interview on BBC Radio 2, Pulp keyboardist Candida Doyle said: “I used to do patchwork when I was on tour, and I made a really nice bit of patchwork.” This came after Cocker responded to rumours about a Worthy Farm comeback, saying that Pulp would only play “if it was a life-or-death situation”.

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