It seems weirdly fitting that Pulp have premiered their first album in 24 years with a song that appears to fret about the validity of returning at all.
Of all the alt-rock artists hoisted to mainstream fame in the Britpop era, they were the ones who seemed least comfortable with the kind of attention it brought them: a perennially ignored band who’d spent a decade striving to get somewhere, only to find they didn’t much like it when they did. Something of the prickly, confrontational outsider clung to them even at the zenith of their success – 1995’s quadruple-platinum Different Class is an album packed with waspish, witty ruminations on the British class system – while 1998’s This Is Hardcore offered a paranoid and occasionally harrowing examination of their era as celebrities, something its dense, doomy sound also helped to draw to a close.
