Pulp has returned with a new album, its first in 24 years. Who could’ve predicted that?

“It took us by surprise as well,” frontman Jarvis Cocker said in a recent interview. “Why not?”

The ambitious Britpop- and-then-some band emerged in the late ’70s in Sheffield, England, artistic outsiders with a penchant for the glam, the grim and, in the case of Cocker, the gawky. Fame eluded them until the mid-’90s, and then it rushed in with the trend of Cool Britannia.

Their songs varied wildly from their contemporaries. Pulp’s David Bowie-informed synth-pop arrived with humor, ambiguity and intellect — songs about sex and class consciousness that manage to be groovy, glib, awkward and amorous all at once.

Pulp has since inspired devotion from loyal fans across generations. They’ve charmed those lucky enough to catch band members in their heyday — before a kind of careerism led to a hiatus in 2002 — and those who saw them for the first time during reunion tours in 2011 and 2022. With all that reputation, it’s reassuring that the band has decided to give its audience “More,” its first new album in over two decades.

There were a few catalysts for “More,” out now. The first: “We could get along with each other still,” drummer Nick Banks jokes. “It wasn’t too painful.” The second: The band worked a new song into its recent reunion-show run — “The Hymn of the North,” originally written for Simon Stephens’ 2019 play “Light Falls” — and people seemed to like it.

The third and most significant: The band’s bassist and core member Steve Mackey died in 2023.

“It made me realize that you don’t have endless amounts of time,” Cocker says. “You’ve still got an opportunity to create things, if you want to. Are you going to give it a go?”

And so, they did.

Cocker assured his bandmates Banks, guitarist Mark Webber and keyboardist Candida Doyle that the recording process could be done quickly — in three weeks, light speed for a band that has infamously agonized over its latter records.

Webber describes a “reticence to get involved in a yearslong process” that was alleviated when they started to work on new songs that came “quite easily.”

That’s at least partially due to the fact that, for the first time in the band’s history, Cocker elected to “write the words in advance. … It’s taken me until the age of 61 to realize it: If you write the words before you go into the studio, it makes it a much more pleasant experience.”

The 11 tracks on “More” are a combination of new and old songs written across Pulp’s career. Mackey has a writing credit on the sultry, existential “Grown Ups,” originally demoed around “This Is Hardcore”; and the edgy disco “Got to Have Love,” written around “the turn of the millennium,” as Cocker explains. “I did have words, but I found myself emotionally unable to sing them.”

“Without love you’re just making a fool of yourself,” he sings in the second verse. “I got nothing else to say about it.”

It makes sense, then, that the romantic song was held until “More,” when Cocker believed them — coincidentally, after he was married in June 2024.

This year also marks the 30th anniversary of the song that defines their career, “Common People.”

“That one, we’ve never really fallen out of love with,” Webber says.

“Because of the way it affects people, really, you can’t fall out of love with it,” Cocker adds.

With the band out on tour, is this the beginning of a new, active era for them?

“The next one is going to be called ‘Even More,’ ” Cocker jokes. “Nah, I don’t know. The album wasn’t conceived of as a tombstone. … The jury is out.”

“It wouldn’t be good for it to end up feeling like you’re stuck on a treadmill,” Banks adds. “And at the moment, it’s still pretty exciting.”