Pulp are back with their first new album in 24 years.
The group – who released their most-recent LP, ‘We Love Life’, back in 2001 – recorded the long-awaited follow-up at London’s Orbb Studio over three weeks in November 2024 with producer James Ford, and contributions from Richard Hawley, the Eno family and others.
“This is the shortest amount of time a Pulp album has ever taken to record,” says frontman Jarvis Cocker in a statement. “It was obviously ready to happen.”
Alongside the album announcement, the group released its lead single, Spike Island, with a music video directed by Cocker, who describes the visual as an inquiry into artificial intelligence via the repurposing of Rankin & Donald’s photographs from the Different Class inlay.
Created by feeding the pictures into an A.I. app to “see where the computer led” him, with prompts such as, “The black & white figure remains still whilst the bus in the background drives off”, he explains: “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…” he adds. “My final thought? H.I. Forever!”
