Pulp came back from the dead in 2011, toured extensively, reminded everyone why “Common People” is still the definitive class-anxiety anthem in the British rock canon, and then went away again. They came back a second time in 2023, put out More in 2025, and have been operating in a mode that is something between resurrection and continuation. The new single “Marrying for Love,” released this week, is a B-side from the recent “The Man Comes Around” twelve-inch, and it is exactly the kind of track that makes you think about what Pulp have always actually been doing.

The song is described by the band as “a deranged, percussive easy-listening thing,” which is either very accurate or the most British possible understatement, probably both. Jarvis Cocker delivers most of it in spoken-word mode, a love song that circles its subject rather than addressing it directly. The music was written by drummer Nick Banks. The mix is clean but strange. It lands the way a lot of Pulp material lands: as something slightly off from what it appears to be on first listen.

Pulp’s career has always been structured around this gap between surface and subtext. They formed in Sheffield in 1978 and spent roughly a decade building a cult audience before the mid-Nineties Britpop wave suddenly made them a phenomenon. The problem with the Britpop wave, for Pulp, was that it wanted to make them into something simpler than they were. Cocker was always writing about desire and class and embarrassment and failure in ways that were too specific and too strange to fit neatly into the lad-culture energy that Britpop often carried. “Common People” works because the class critique is buried inside a pop song so well-constructed that you can sing it without engaging with the argument. The argument is there regardless.

His ‘n’ Hers in 1994 and Different Class in 1995 are the twin peaks of their original run, and both records reward close listening in ways that casual acquaintance with the singles does not prepare you for. The Britpop moment gave them the audience, but the audience showed up expecting one thing and found something more interesting.

This Is Hardcore in 1998 was the deliberate pivot away from pop accessibility, a dark record about celebrity and performance and the cost of the previous three years. It was misread at the time as a commercial miscalculation. It has since been reappraised as one of the most important British albums of the Nineties, which is the correct reading.

The reunion era has been handled with unusual grace. More did not try to recapture a specific Pulp sound. It made room for Cocker’s current sensibility, which is drier and more philosophical but still recognizably his. The spoken-word mode that dominates “Marrying for Love” has always been part of his toolkit. He has used it to deliver observations about human behavior with the timing of a very dry comedian who happens to be fronting a post-punk band.

“Marrying for Love” is a small thing in the context of a catalogue this rich. But small things from Pulp tend to contain larger arguments, and the fact that they are still making them, still releasing odd little tracks that reward the kind of attention most bands stopped asking for decades ago, is worth noting. Some bands come back. Pulp came back and kept going.