This Is Hardcore

After Different Class friction grew in the band, and it ended in the departure of Russell Senior. Cocker went to New York alone to decompress and write, and the songs he came back with leaned toward art rock and glam rock. Work began in November 1996 and finished in January 1998, with Chris Thomas producing at the Townhouse and Olympic in London. Anne Dudley and the band arranged the strings, Nicholas Dodd orchestrated two tracks, and Neneh Cherry sings on Seductive Barry. In an interview in January 1998 Cocker said that realising an ambition seemed to curdle somebody's spirit. Writing in the Guardian in 2003, he said he had attained an ambition in life and found it was not all it was cracked up to be.

Peter Saville and the painter John Currin art directed the sleeve. Cocker said he first came across Currin's work in 1996, in a book for an exhibition called Wild Walls. The model on the cover is Ksenia Zlobina, and advertising posters on the London Underground were defaced with slogans such as This Is Sexist. Four singles came out: Help the Aged on 10 November 1997, This Is Hardcore on 11 March 1998, A Little Soul on 8 June 1998 and Party Hard on 7 September 1998.

The album debuted at number one on the UK chart, but first-week sales of just over 50,000 were 62 percent below those of Different Class. The BPI certified it gold in April 1998, for 100,000, and it earned Pulp a third successive Mercury nomination. Rolling Stone called it less bright and bouncy than its predecessor but even more daring and fully realized, and in Spin Nick Hornby wrote that Cocker perfects his poetry of the prosaic. For NME, Matthew Horton said that in its sense of surrender, regret and flashes of panic it captured the time to a tee. Paul Pearson wrote in Treble that it was still shattering at 20, and called A Little Soul Pulp's most heartbreaking song. NME placed it at 166 in its 2013 list of the 500 greatest albums, and Pitchfork ranked it seventh in its 2017 list of the 50 best Britpop albums. A deluxe edition appeared on 11 September 2006.