A haunting classic reborn with Pulp’s sly warmth.
Pulp have returned with a curveball that somehow feels inevitable: a shadow-soaked, slow-burning take on Johnny Cash’s late-era prophecy piece, ‘The Man Comes Around.’
It marks their first studio drop since the triumph of More, and rather than extending that neon-lit world, the band sidesteps into something stranger, something with teeth.
Cash wrote the track in his final creative stretch, a stark meditation built from Revelation fire and dream logic. Pulp don’t mimic that austerity. Instead, they carve out a sly, cinematic groove, an easy-listening strut that’s just off-kilter enough to let the dread seep through the cracks.
Jarvis Cocker delivers the verses like a man reading doom aloud in a lounge bar at closing time, his voice slipping between sermon and smirk.
The infamous line about “kicking against the pricks” lands with the deliberate thud of a man who knows his Nick Cave references and isn’t afraid to lean into them.
The cover first surfaced in the ITV drama The Hack, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it placement that immediately set fans scrambling.
Now it forms the centrepiece of an upcoming 12-inch, joined by two unreleased tracks, “Marrying For Love” and “Cold Call On The Hot Line”, promising a companion piece to More rather than an afterthought.
What makes this version stick isn’t irony or theatrics, but the conviction beneath the gloss.
Cash sang like he’d seen the end of days. Pulp sound like they’re watching it unfold in real time. Its hard to dislike this cover, truely. It opens you up and crawls in, filling you with something surging and brimming with energy.
The kind that doesn’t just move through you, but quietly rearranges you.
It’s the slow, deliberate swell of a song that knows exactly what it’s doing.
