Jarvis Cocker = Pulp = More new album

 This month, the beloved British pop band Pulp will release “More,” its first new album in 24 years. Jarvis Cocker, the band’s founder, lyricist, and front man, has engaged in innumerable interesting projects in the meantime—an album with his band Jarv Is, collaborations with Wes Anderson and Chilly Gonzales, a BBC radio program, an excellent memoir, “Good Pop Bad Pop”—but the new Pulp record feels like a significant return, triumphant and humble at once. The band became hugely popular in the nineties, amid Britpop, owing to its catchy melodies, danceable rhythms, and Cocker’s sly, funny, sharply observant lyrics, with themes of class consciousness, sex, and the gentle absurdities of the human condition—all of which reached an apotheosis in the song “Common People,” which turned into an anthem. Pulp’s celebrity became uncomfortable for Cocker in the late nineties, and the band went on hiatus in 2002. They’ve toured occasionally since, notably in 2012, when a farewell show in Sheffield was documented in the 2014 movie “Pulp: A Film About Life, Death, and Supermarkets.”

Sarah Larson recently visited MOMA with Cocker, where they took in exhibits and talked about life, art, the new Pulp album, and the passage of time. “In a weird way, I’ve come around to the idea of Pulp again,” Cocker tells Larson.

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