Pulp have announced their first album since 2001’s We Love Life, entitled More, trailed by a new single, Spike Island.

“I was born to perform, it’s a calling / I exist to do this, shouting and pointing”, frontman Jarvis Cocker sings on the anthemic song, ushering one of the most successful British bands of the 1990s into a new phase.

More will be released on 6 June. A new picture of the group shows they have swelled to a nine-piece, featuring longstanding members – Cocker, guitarist Mark Webber, keyboardist Candida Doyle and drummer Nick Banks – alongside newer touring members. The album is dedicated to Steve Mackey, their bassist who died aged 56 in March 2023.

Speaking to Lauren Laverne on BBC Radio 6 Music, Cocker said More had been “done for a while” and that Pulp’s 2023 reunion tour was “a big influence … the songs came back to life”.

Spike Island, meanwhile, is named after the famous venue for an open-air Stone Roses concert in 1990, which was attended by Webber. He told Laverne it was “a slight anticlimax to be honest … there was a lot of anticipation, but it didn’t sound very good, it was windy and the vibe wasn’t there.” The song’s music was written by former Cocker collaborator Jason Buckle, who was also at Spike Island. Cocker said that “all [Buckle] could remember was a DJ who said: ‘Spike Island, come alive.’ That phrase stuck in my mind.”

Driven by that chorus line, Spike Island is an anthemic, swaggering track, filled out with a large arrangement and Cocker’s typically wry yet heartfelt lyrics: “I was conforming to a cosmic design, I was playing to type / Until I walked back to the garden of earthly delights”, he sings.

Cocker used AI to create the song’s video, which animates images made of the band for their chart-topping, Britpop-defining 1995 album Different Class. Cocker explained that “all the moving images featured in the video are the result of me feeding in a still image and then typing in a prompt”, but he clarified that “no AI was involved during the process” of making More itself.

The album was recorded with producer James Ford – known for his work with Arctic Monkeys, Wet Leg and more – and completed in three weeks in a studio in Walthamstow, east London. “It wanted to come out, in some way – that was a good feeling,” Cocker said.

In a longer written statement, he added: “When we started touring again in 2023, we practiced a new song called Hymn of the North during sound checks and 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 the album during the first half of 2024. A couple are revivals of ideas from last century.”

A fellow Sheffield star, Richard Hawley, co-wrote one of its songs, while “the Eno family” – presumably Brian Eno and others – sing backing vocals on another.

The new album extends an already epic career, with the earliest form of Pulp dating back to 1978 when Cocker was still at school in Sheffield – after some lineup changes the group released their debut album It in 1983. Playing a rather mournful style of indie pop, Pulp struggled to achieve much momentum during the rest of the decade, but started to break through after a turn towards a more commercial, disco-influenced sound on 1992 album Separations.

They jumped to a major label for follow-up His ’n’ Hers which reached the UK Top 10 and contained classics such as Babies, Lipgloss and Do You Remember the First Time?, all great showcases of Cocker’s vivid storytelling as he explored the thrill and awkwardness of desire.

Their biggest hit came in 1995 with Different Class, which topped the album chart and featured one of the defining British anthems in Common People, Cocker’s tale of a posh art student slumming it with the working class. Another chart-topper followed in 1998 – the considerably more jaded and moody This Is Hardcore – and the band wound down with 2001’s We Love Life, co-produced by the late Scott Walker.

Since then, the only new music they’ve released is a song from the We Love Life sessions, entitled After You, which was completed and released in 2013. Pulp also reformed for tours in 2011 and 2023.

Around the reunions, Cocker released two solo albums followed by a full-length collaboration with Chilly Gonzales. He then formed a new band somewhat under his own name, Jarv Is, who put out their debut album Beyond the Pale in 2020 and recorded the soundtrack to BBC drama series This Is Going to Hurt.

Cocker has also collaborated numerous times with film-maker Wes Anderson. He voiced a Cockeresque character called Petey in Anderson’s stop-motion retelling of Fantastic Mr Fox, and appeared in another Roald Dahl adaptation by Anderson, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. Cocker’s most recent solo album is Chansons d’Ennui Tip-Top, performed in character as French pop singer Tip-Top who features in Anderson’s 2021 film The French Dispatch. Cocker then played a musical cowboy in 2023 ensemble drama Asteroid City.

Pulp are also looking towards summer tour dates across UK arenas, European festivals and the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.

Cocker said the concerts would be “mental, in a good way … they are big, but hopefully it won’t feel big, we’re going to try to do something where the audience feels they’re sat there with us”. He alluded to film-maker Garth Jennings filming the tour.

But he ruled out Glastonbury this year, saying the festival “has a very important place in our hearts, but there’s no plans to play there”.