More.

There is a new Pulp album.

"Different Class" was a tremendously important album for me growing up, and by that I mean all the way from a thirteen year old holding what felt like some of the most important music of the present day up to somewhere in my mid thirties, by which point everyone else had decided Britpop was a mistake and we shouldn't talk of it ever again.

I once heard a mix tape described as writing letters with other people's words, and as a misfit, mis-shape (mistake?) Jarvis Cocker and company gave me those words. More than that, "Different Class" was my experiences, through the same lens I saw them. Not that I knew it back in 1995; it took another two decades to accumulate those reunions that never happen, the hollow feelings while everyone else is off their heads having fun, and the realisation that if you call your dad he probably can't stop it all.

Then one day in the mid-2010s I listened to "Bar Italia" and it clicked into place in a way it hadn't before. We made it. We hit our mid-thirties, we survived, how about coffee? It was the last puzzle piece; I'd lived all of "Different Class" for myself. I'd run out of album before I ran out of life.

Cocker was 31 at the point most of these lyrics were recorded, and the album spans from being a teenager who's allowed to go to town by themselves up to about that point. A couple of albums followed it, but they never felt quite so personal, tending to make wry observations about topical subjects as with "Bad Cover Version" from 2001's "We Love Life".

Then along comes "More".

Pulp's first album in 24 years was a welcome surprise, even if advance singles "Spike Island" and "Got To Have Love" hinted at something more like Suede's 2010s comeback; solid and listenable in the style you know them for, but nothing that's going to resonate with you the way "New Generation" did hearing it back when you were the new generation in question.

Three tracks in and that record gets namechecked on "Grown Ups", a song all about the unease of checking yourself for wrinkles while still not sure if you know how to be an adult yet. Is that pub conversation utter inanity or is it intended to be serious? Why can't I tell?

It's not quite so focused on musings of everyday life as "Different Class" and Jarvis finds time to examine his own sense of self outside of being the outcasts' everyman, but the moments where he dwells on what it's like to hit middle age as one of the original mis-shapes crash home like nothing else I've listened to in a very long time. Love becoming background noise, still carrying the dreams you used to have, even going to the local shopping centre to buy yourself some time are all words about my condition I didn't know I needed.

Sonically it fits that theme of growing old. "More" looks backward, even repeating the odd theme or lyric directly from "Different Class", but there's a more relaxed and mature feel. We're old enough to have at least one Scott Walker album on our shelves by now, and Pulp are happy to dig into that big warm syrupy sound.

I was always disappointed that none of the follow-up albums spoke to me the way "Different Class" did, but perhaps it is Pulp's curse to emerge only when needed, which they were not as the deviation-will-be-punished awkwardness of my teenage years gave way to the optimism of the mid-2000s. But that world is disappearing fast, and Pulp are needed once more.

This feeling is at its most poignant for me on album closer "Sunset", which puts into words my feelings of being an ageing liberal who was once very optimistic about technology and the Internet watching the world of 2025. It's a very thoughtful form of listening, but maybe for three minutes we do have a voice.