Pulp return a quarter of a century after their last album with a nostalgic tribute to the Stone Roses’ legendary / mythical gathering at Spike Island.

I’m always wary when groups get back together after a long hiatus so nerves were jangling with the news that Pulp have gone back into the studio 30 years after their classic album Different Class.

That was the one with the era-defining Common People and those other hit singles – Disco 2000, Sorted For Es And Wizz, Something Changed – that did change our entire musical landscape. How could they possibly top that?

Well of course they couldn’t, and they don’t try. But their comeback single Spike Island is so much better than we had any right to expect. I mean it’s not as good as those four, but that would be asking too much.

It’s like someone asked AI to create a “classic Pulp single.” And it’s exactly that; in fact the video was created by AI after Jarvis fed images taken by photographers Rankin and Donald Milne for the Different Class album in 1995 into his computer.

As for the song, well everything is present and correct: the familiar slashing guitar chords, the familiar synth stabs, the familiar talk-singing in the familiar Sheffield accent. It’s immediately, obviously, happily, Pulp.

As one of the commenters on YouTube says succinctly: “It’s like a hug from someone you haven’t seen for ages and they still smell the same. Exactly that.

And if Jarvis’s voice is a little weathered by the patina of time, and his moves a little creakier in his late 50s, he still looks essentially the same – eccentric ’70s college lecturer – and all his trademark gestures are there, along with those little yelps and sighs.

Welcome back!