I know a woman who likes to tell this story about the day she learned about sex. It happened when she was 11, she thinks, after a confusing night kept awake by a series of loud barnyard noises coming from her parents’ bedroom. Miserable, the next morning, as to why mom and dad were playing dumb at all her questions about their obvious racket, she chose to reenact everything she’d heard right there at the kitchen table. She made hiccupy gasps, rammed the dinette into the wall like a headboard, moaned, whimpered, and slurped. When at last mom knelt at her side and managed to quell this desperate, heaving child, our heroine looked at her with tears in her eyes. “I heard you,” she said. “You said give it to me hard.”

I admire this story, and not just because it ends with her mother explaining human intercourse to her over a bowl of shredded wheat. I admire it because it makes clear that the problem with growing older is that it proves just how much there is that you don’t know. Adulthood’s irregular flow of revelations will lead you to the awful conclusion that there will always be something to confuse or torture you anew, and guidance, should you be so lucky to get some, often comes by way of a vessel not of your choosing.

Sensibly, legions of former children have elected to find relief in the steadying baritone of Jarvis Cocker, who, at 61, has spent an entire career mapping the funny, endearing, and usually nightmarish discoveries of pubescence (and post-pubescence, and post-post-pubescence) with his band, Pulp. Across two decades—and nearly four now, with this new album—Cocker has become a laureate of genitalia and the brains that wire them; a psychodramatist of families and the thin-walled homes they live in; a reliable soap-operatist of the hormonal human condition. “I ended up documenting my puberty through pop music,” he said, not long ago. “I wanted it to go through puberty with me.”

This is a monstrous understatement. If we were to print Pulp’s entire lyrical oeuvre in one reader-friendly manuscript, the lay analyst would find a songwriter not only locked in the phallic stage, but trapped in an entire phallic theatre. Sex is Pulp’s thing: How one can get it, if there is more of it, and whether or not it can happen tonight. The first- and third-person narrators of Pulp tracks are chained to these premises, and not infrequently effecting some sort of sexual misdemeanor in their pursuit. There is a lot of tom-peeping and notable upskirting, stories in which whole cities reach orgasm in miraculous unison, erotic epics that seem to speak directly from the crotch. (This is a discography given to world-historical song titles like “Underwear,” “My Erection,” and “Can I Have My Balls Back, Please.”) With a sort of lothario suavity picked up second-hand from Engelbert Humperdinck, or Bryan Ferry, or Serge Gainsbourg, rare is the Pulp track without a dose of horny sotto voce muttering, sharp sexy inhalations, Cocker squealing like a hog in heat.

But Cocker’s sex drive, aside from being hypnotically conspicuous, is a fuel source that allows him to motor through greater vistas. When everyone comes installed with the capacity to desire, what do we actually want, and how badly do we want it? In Pulp songs, all lusts braid together, and become impossible to untangle. His band’s hugest, most inescapable track is a class war cabaret that considers how long a Marxist can tolerate a rich girl pretending to be a prole if he really wants to sleep with her. Fables of lumpen households filled with lumpen, libidinal children end with them killed, abused, jailed in the ranks they were born to. One of my favorites is a ballad of a teenage girl murdered on the edge of town by a pervert. “You’re such a beautiful girl,” he sings. “And he only did what he did ’cause you looked like one of his kids.”

Pulp’s gift for the queasy and sleazy often feels as if the band took the Leonard Cohen line about the value of dignifying what’s normally undignified, and made it their credo. “It is easy to display a wound, the proud scars of combat,” Cohen wrote in his first novel. “It is hard to show a pimple.” Pulp is a superflux of boils and pus, and keeps its gaze focused on them to ensure that the hard-to-watch gets seen, the tough-to-hear gets heard. I also suspect Cocker does this because grotesquerie—shorthand for the grisly anxieties, heartbreaks, and sundry strifes of living—gets him off. “People get more furtive and perverse as they get older,” Cocker said with dégagé authority, way back in 1995. “I’m hoping to extend my adolescence as far as possible.”

After 30 years—and 24 of them since we’ve heard an album from Pulp proper—Cocker maintains a healthy, open perversity, and in More’s new rhapsodies of regret and common people, manfully continues to use his sex as a grounding rod. There is a song exactly halfway through this album titled “My Sex.” And here’s a line from the album’s best single. “Without love,” he shouts in the middle of a cut of Northern soul, “You’re just jerking off inside someone else.”

Cocker’s gospel this time around—with a little more innocence lost, a lot more experience gained—recasts his perpetual puberty into an embrace of entropy. The world doesn’t stop doing what the world wants to do, and Cocker, who has historically served as a sort of floaty, somewhat omniscient character from a distant cloud (“I am not Jesus, but we share the same initials,” he sang in 1998), is here stationed from a nearer foothill. Shuttling us through gardens of nostalgia and loss, memories of things that did or didn’t happen, and definitely mentioning his sex drive, the bard of More gestures sweepingly at a life of revelations, sighs, and wonders whether he should have talked to that woman he saw on the street years ago.

More is an album of decisions, where the paths keep forking, and consequences compound. “Though we’ve never spoken or exchanged emails,” goes “Tina,” a paean to a woman our narrator’s never met, “Yes, tonight I’m thinking about scenes from a marriage that never took place.” What happens to life’s flow chart when we foreclose a possibility? What happens when—as in “Farmer’s Market,” a capacious orchestral ballad about an encounter with an attractive woman in a parking lot—acting on impulse pays off? What would’ve happened if we didn’t go back and get her number? Isn’t it time, as the breathy crescendo asks, “We started living?”

In songs that sound like Eurodisco, chanson, theatre-sized string arrangement, and a little bit of Kurt Weill, More’s pursuit is the business of living, and the stakes involved therein. Memories of things done and not done catch us erratically—padding about the kitchen, the bedroom—and make the mind reel. The buzz of a fridge, in “Background Noise,” summons the sound of love’s long-gone hum, and rockets us into an elegy not far off from the species of heartache summoned in “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling.” ”My Sex”— which I can sketch out loosely as what would happen if Leonard Cohen asked Martin Amis to write him a song—has his glans become a metonym for his art writ large. “My sex is out of its mind,” he mutters. “My sex is running out of time.”

Cocker’s called More “age-apropriate,” which spans not only the poetry inside it, but the noises it makes. We’re not dealing with the deliciously cheap and chintzy synths that made those early ’90s albums so ridiculously spangly. More goes big and mature with lusher, sometimes even baroque arrangements to surround Cocker’s voice—a voice that’s huskier, more leaden by time and gravity. The huge quantity of violins on “Hymn of the North” (with members of the Eno family singing backup) makes him sound as rich and blue as the late Scott Walker, a lodestar and former producer. And though the album still has grounding in big fat basslines and BPMs that occasionally flirt with disco, the distinct chug of longtime bassist Steve Mackey—who died in 2023, and to whose memory this album is dedicated—is missing all over. Recording without Mackey “was weird at first,” Cocker says. “It was not the nicest thing.”

But Pulp remains resolutely Pulpy, and the ingredients and pillars that are absent are outpaced by what still is. Cocker yawps as he used to on the other side of the millennium, still invokes a very specific type of woman’s name (like Paula, Sylvia, Deborah, and now Tina), and the tracks are peopled by sprawling family trees of imagined mothers, aunts, vicars, sisters, brothers, fathers. “Like two little children under the covers,” goes “Grown Ups,” the album’s crux, “I’ll be dad, and you’ll be the mom.” Like a mid-life callback to 1993’s “Babies,” where the fumbly narrator watches his friend’s sister have sex through a closet door, it’s a track where we witness our narrator caught in the throes of a watershed. What’s watersheddy about “Grown-Ups,” though, isn’t the spectacle of another sex act, but the slower, more mundane epiphany that adulthood is inherently part of coming-of-age. Children pretend to be mature just as foolishly as adults do, but the pile-up of quotidian acts of idiocy are exactly what builds a life. “We’ll make out we know what it is,” he says, “but we don’t.” ‘Coming-of-age’ might usually be seen as a transitional period we’ve long since passed but here, Cocker seems to sandwich our palms, look into our eyes, and shake his head no—it’s one of those lifelong processes. To paraphrase the chorus, being grown-up has no discrete age or eon; it’s an art, or an act.

Perhaps understandably, Cocker, so consumed by the drama of being alive, resists directly rhapsodizing about his own death. (“I am not aging,” he says, tellingly, in “Grown Ups.” “I am just ripening.”) In one of his rare embraces of the end, he announced that “I Never Said I Was Deep,” the title of a track from Pulp’s 2001 album, We Love Life, would fit nicely onto his headstone. As far as epitaphs go, sure: a good option. But then I think about it some more. Considering how much time the Pulp frontman has spent hurling such blunt and freakish bolts of human revelation—so much like the thunderstrike of awe, squirmy terror, and relief a child would feel if she, say, just learned about the existence of sex at breakfast—an alternate contender comes to mind. May he live long, but for all the guidance he’s dealt us so sharply and generously on More (and everything prior to it), Cocker could stand to be more honest. When the time comes, it should read “HE GAVE IT TO US HARD.”