The thing about Jarvis Cocker is that he has always been more concerned with observation than resolution. Pulp's Britpop-era classics — Common People, Mis-Shapes, Disco 2000 — were not love songs or anthems so much as detailed transcripts of class anxiety and desire and the peculiar British experience of watching the world from slightly the wrong angle. 'Begging for Change,' the band's first new single of 2026, is more of the same. This is not a complaint.
The song arrives twenty-five years after This Is Hardcore and still in the extended aftermath of the band's reunion albums. Cocker is now sixty-two, which doesn't come up explicitly in 'Begging for Change' but is present in every line. The song is about being overlooked in middle age, about the specific indignity of relevance becoming a thing you have to ask for rather than simply have. 'Begging for Change' is not a joke, but it has the knowing wit that Cocker has always used to make painful observations bearable.
The production is Pulp-as-expected: synth-forward, slightly camp, with a guitar line that's sharper than it initially appears. Cocker's vocal is warm and measured, the voice of someone who has been performing for long enough to know exactly how to deliver a line. The phrase 'begging for change' does double and triple duty throughout, and Cocker never makes you work to find the meanings.
Pulp is one of those bands whose reunion runs have actually been good enough to justify the nostalgia economy they inevitably participate in. 'Begging for Change' is further evidence that Cocker still has things to say that are worth hearing. Grade: A-.