FEATURE:
Alright, Still?
PHOTO CREDIT: Charlie Denis
Exploring Lily Allen’s Remarkable and Moving West End Girl
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SOME might see the title…
IN THIS IMAGE: The cover of Lily Allen’s West End Girl/ART CREDIT: Nieves González
of Lily Allen’s fifth studio album and think of the Classic Pet Shop Boys song, West End Girls, of 1986. However, when listening to Allen’s fifth studio album, you realise that this is perhaps her most powerful, personal and remarkable release. Arriving after 2018’s No Shame, I am going to end with a couple of reviews for West End Girl. It was a bit of a surprise. Without the build-up and endless promotion that artists do for albums, this came pretty quickly and without ceremony. West End Girl is going to win awards and go down as one of the best albums of the year. I think that many have that perception of Lily Allen as being exactly like she was when she on 2006’s Alright, Still. Even though that album deals with relationships in a raw way and has some darker lyrics, the music is lighter and more Ska-influenced. It has this more uplifted, sunny and playful edge. I think many people always have that view of her. However, listen to No Shame and especially West End Girl, and it is clear that Allen is a different artist. The assumption that her new album is all personal and about the breakdown of her marriage (due to the infidelity of David Harbour). That is not explicitly the case. As Stylus explain, it does not matter if each line is gospel truth or there is some fiction. It is this soul and teeth-baring album that should be cherished and heralded:
“The assumption is that the album references Allen’s ex-husband, actor David Harbour, from whom she split in December 2024 after four years of marriage. The musician has been clear that she has taken creative liberties, describing West End Girl as a “mixture of fact and fiction”. But while not every lyric may have been drawn directly from Allen’s real life, what’s refreshing about the record are its straight-talking lyrics and refusal to hide behind metaphor. There are no Easter eggs or guessing games about how Allen feels or what she thinks. The word vulnerability has been so overused in recent years to become almost meaningless, but Allen is genuinely vulnerable in songs such as Ruminating, in which she sings of obsessing over a partner’s other loves: “I can’t shake the image of her naked on top of you and I’m dissociated… I’m not hateful but you make me hate her.”
Too often, women are told to conform, to be stoic, to shrink. From an early age, we’re taught to stay polite, agreeable, contained. All of these pressures are magnified for women in the public eye. And when women express anger or sadness after a breakup, we’re called bitter, unladylike, washed-up. Not only that, women are often made to feel as though it’s undignified to air the truth about how or why a relationship ended. Angelina Jolie and Amber Heard have both been cast as hysterical or vindictive for speaking out about alleged mistreatment and abuse (claims their ex-husbands have denied). Even Princess Diana, the so-called people’s princess, was sometimes painted as vengeful or unstable for daring to speak candidly about her marriage to the then-Prince Charles.
Men don’t face the same treatment. It might be seen as unmasculine to be cheated on, but generally, when a man speaks about suffering due to infidelity, he is cast as a sympathetic figure. Justin Timberlake’s Cry Me A River video, which suggested Britney Spears had cheated on him, is perhaps the all-time example of this (despite Spears later stating that, actually, Timberlake had been unfaithful to her). The dynamic can be seen in cases of general heartbreak, too. Think of the kneejerk response to Joe Jonas and Sophie Turner’s divorce, which framed him as the wounded, responsible dad while she was criticised for having too much fun. Or Ben Affleck’s misery in paparazzi shots, and how it became seen as endearing. When men hurt publicly, we reward them for vulnerability; when women do, we call it oversharing. Yet despite knowing the risk of being shamed for her candour, Allen has gone full-throttle in West End Girl.
But it doesn’t matter whether each line in West End Girl is the gospel truth (again, Allen has said this isn’t the case). Her private life is hers to share or fictionalise as she sees fit – although I’m sure many lawyers were involved before the record was released. Instead, what is interesting about the album is its emotional honesty. Allen has always written clearly about her feelings and experiences: satirising them but never sanitising them to fit neatly into a more-marketable box. In a world where too many women still hold back from saying how they really feel, that’s something to be inspired by”.
Before I get to a couple of reviews for West End Girl, there are some new interviews that I want to cover. Allen discussing her album. One, as I say, that will sit alongside the very finest of 2025. I am going to start with a brilliant and in-depth interview from Perfect. For anyone who has not followed Lily Allen and is not perhaps aware of what she has been though in regards to her marriage breakdown and addiction struggles, it is discussed in this interview. West End Girl is this album that talks about her experiences and marriage breakup in a very potent way, though this being Lily Allen, there is still humour and wit running through it:
“West End Girl, the new album from Lily Allen, is a coruscating account of a broken marriage in 14 startling pop songs, alternately angry, despairing and defiant. Each track opens a new chapter in a sad and sometimes sordid story, and each is delivered with Allen’s bravura combination of angelic voice, acid tongue.
A hardcore revenge drama, a pitch-black anti-romcom, a work of bracing autofiction written from the point of view of a woman scorned, betrayed, provoked, Allen’s fifth album is that rare thing in the age of Spotify: a collection of songs conceived as a single work, to be consumed whole, in sequence.
The title nods to the Pet Shop Boys classic (“Too many shadows, whispering voices / Faces on posters, too many choices”) as well as to the singer’s recent successes as an actress on the London stage.
It opens with a title track that functions almost as if it were the opening scene in a stage musical, words spoken as much as sung, snatches of dialogue, crestfallen phone calls. Then it’s away: panicky spiralling (‘Ruminating’), unanswered pleas for honesty (‘Sleepwalking’) and the one-two gut-punch of ‘Tennis’ and ‘Madeline’, an imagined conversation between a wronged wife and the other woman in her husband’s life: ‘I can’t trust anything that comes out of your mouth / I’m not convinced that he didn’t fuck you in our house.’
The lurid, uncompromising ‘Pussy Palace’ will perhaps receive the most feverish attention from amateur online sleuths: ‘Duane Reade bag with the handles tied / Sex toys, butt plugs, lube inside / Hundreds of Trojans you’re so fucking broken / How did I get caught up in your double life?’
On ‘4Chan Stan’ the cheating husband is dismissed with a sharp barb: ‘You’re not even cute.’ Later songs ‘Nonmonogamummy’; the forlorn ‘Dallas Major’ – explore the disappointments of a 40-year-old woman seeking validation on dating apps. And the drama reaches a vituperative pitch with the heartbroken ‘Beg For Me’.
West End Girl moves through suspicion, paranoia, shock, recrimination and, ultimately, some kind of catharsis: closing number ‘Fruityloop’, in which tentative accommodation is made with what has gone before, in a phrase that calls back to the title of her most successful album, from 2009: ‘And finally I see / It’s not me, it’s you.’
PHOTO CREDIT: Morgan Maher
It is, as they say, a lot. But then much has happened – clearly! – in the seven years since Allen’s last album, 2018’s No Shame.
First, she got sober. Then she met and married the actor David Harbour and moved to a townhouse in Brooklyn. She embarked on a successful new career as a stage actor, starred in a TV sitcom, marketed her own sex toy. She launched a hit podcast with her friend Miquita Oliver. She opened an OnlyFans account to sell images of her feet. To much acclaim she returned to singing live, as a guest of the American pop sensation Olivia Rodrigo at Glastonbury and then at the O2 in London on Rodrigo’s Guts tour.
Everything seemed to be going splendidly, even if there were those, like me, who occasionally wished she’d get back in the studio and make some new music – because for all her many talents, being a pop star is still what she does best.
Then the relationship with Harbour broke down, and they separated.
AB: You haven’t released any new music in seven years. Was there a period where you thought you might permanently retire from pop stardom?
LA: Yeah, there was a lot of time where I felt like that. I was writing pretty consistently throughout the last four years, but I just didn’t think it was any good.
AB: Why not?
LA: I don’t know. I can’t really explain it. To me the value in it is meaningless until it feels like it’s something that you want to release into the world. And I hadn’t gotten to that point until I wrote this collection of songs.
AB: You were blocked?
LA: I was. I hated everything. I guess I have a barometer, which is that if I don’t leave the studio with a bounce of the song to listen to in the car or to send to friends, then I know I’m not emotionally attached to it, I know I don’t really care about it.
AB: What were you writing about at that time?
LA: Observational stuff about the internet and the world. It just all seemed really obvious and crap.
AB: No Shame was made after a turbulent period in your life. Among other things, you’d got divorced from Sam [Cooper, her first husband and father of her daughters]. Do you find it easier to write, and that the work is better, if you have had some personal difficulty that you can channel into the songs?
LA: Yes, but I don’t think that that’s unique in any way. I think everyone does. Even people on the Daily Mail comment section. It’s easier to write funny things that are rooted in darkness or anger or... terminal hatred.
AB: Let’s talk about West End Girl. You’ve been saying to me over the years that you were struggling to come up with songs you liked. And then not so long ago you said you’re going to LA to make a record and it felt like two days later you got back and it was done.
LA: It was 10 days.
AB: Ten days is still astonishingly quick to write and record an album. Tell me how it happened. What was it that provoked this sudden outpouring of really good material?
LA: I wish I could tell you. If I knew the answer to that then I would make it happen all the time. I think with all my records – bar [her third album] Sheezus, which felt a little bit misguided – all of them have felt like… not hard. I mean, it was hard to make this record. It was incredibly manic, and it was emotionally traumatic. But nothing felt forced. It just sort of fell out of me. And I think that’s what happens when you’re writing from a place of truth, and without an agenda. I think when I struggle with writing it’s because I’m worried about how things are going to be perceived or how things are going to be consumed, or where I exist in the market, or whatever. This record was purely for me, and it was a way of processing things that I was going through in my private life.
AB: You made it in LA.
LA: I made it with a friend of mine who was also the musical director on my last tour, Blue May. And he put together a really strong team of different people – writers, producers, players – that would come and go from his studio in LA. There were a few days that we went and worked in this guy called Chrome Sparks’s house, but apart from that it was all done in the same room.
AB: It is a very dark record. It’s the sound of someone in pain. Forgive me for telling you what your own record’s about, but it is the story of a broken marriage and a series of betrayals that has caused the singer to feel really devastated. Is that an accurate description of West End Girl?
LA: Yes. That is an accurate description.
AB: The album paints a very unflattering portrait of the idea of open marriage. People have had open marriages for centuries, of course. But it does seem to have become somehow part of the culture lately, the idea of polyamorous relationships, multiple partners. And it strikes me that women are made to feel sort of uncool or uptight if they don’t go along with it, because it’s the modern way of being.
LA: Do I think that that’s true? Yeah, I do. And it seems to me that younger people find it easier to embrace as a concept. Maybe the 2.4-children-nuclear-family thing has not been rammed down their throats quite as much, so it’s not so much in their wiring. But it’s not something I ever thought about when I was younger or going into either one of my marriages.
AB: Do you find the idea of an open marriage appealing?
LA: No.
AB: Some people would be like, ‘Oh, amazing idea!’ You get to have all the comfort and reassurance of a relationship but you also get to fuck other people.
LA: I guess it’s just my attachment style. I grew up in a really unstable household. Neither of my parents was particularly present. And so what I craved in adulthood from my relationships was to be centred. And I’m not particularly interested in anything else. Right?
AB: Totally. I also would not find the idea of an open marriage appealing. I mean, I’m older than you. When I was younger this was not presented as a serious option. But everything’s changed. I think porn is responsible for a load of this.
LA: I think porn is responsible for a load of it, and I think that Instagram is responsible for a load of it. If you are a 60-year-old man and you’re on social media you’re not being served pictures of women in their forties. You’re being served pictures of women in their mid-twenties. The algorithm is showing you what is desirable”.
I am going to come to an interview with British Vogue. Though they say this is Lily Allen making her musical comeback – a word I hate, as I have said, as Allen went nowhere and it is not a return or comeback! -, West End Girl is “is putting the tumult of her life into her music once more”. It is one of the most remarkable albums of the year. One that many people were not expecting:
“The album certainly appears to tell a story of a marriage coming spectacularly undone; of the all-consuming pain and confusion of betrayal. The upbeat opening track, “West End Girl”, acts as a sunny musical prelude of sorts, setting the scene of a newlywed couple embarking on married life in a Brooklyn brownstone (sounds awfully like the home she and Harbour showed Architectural Digest around in 2023, to internet-breaking effect). Already, though, there are warning signs (“You were pushing this forward / made me feel a bit awkward,” she sings). From there, the album unfolds like a tragic novel, each subsequent song a different chapter charting a relationship’s demise.
Take one of the album’s standout tracks, “Sleepwalking”: “You let me think it was me in my head / and nothing to do with them girls in your bed”. Or “Dallas Major”: “You know I used to be quite famous that was way back in the day / I probably should explain how my marriage has been open since my husband went astray”. Allen’s deadpan, “fuck you” humour is alive and well: “What a sad, sad man, it’s giving 4chan stan” she sings on “4chan”. Running through it all is a narrator desperately trying to understand what the hell happened to the life she thought she had. So here’s the question then: is it her?
Allen sucks on her vape. “There are things that are on the record that I experienced within my marriage, but that’s not to say that it’s all gospel,” she says, in the manner of someone who has recently spent an inordinate amount of money on lawyers’ fees. “It is inspired by what went on in the relationship.” What did she feel as she was making it? Cue more displacement activity as she applies a coat of lip balm and replies: “Confusion, sorrow, grief, helplessness.”
Between the end of last year and speaking to her now, Allen has been to “some very, very bleak places” emotionally. It wasn’t always thus: though she has long since scrubbed her Instagram clean of any Harbour-related content, scroll back far enough on his and you can find the blissful photos from their wedding day: her, beaming, in a 1960s-style Dior minidress, being held aloft outside the Graceland Wedding Chapel; the newly marrieds with her children having a celebratory In-N-Out burger.
PHOTO CREDIT: Francesca Allen
Thinking about it, all of her albums “have been informed by big traumatic experiences”, she says. “My first album really was the break-up of my first love. And my second one was – this is going to sound so stupid – but the ‘Trauma of Fame’.” Her third, Sheezus, “was a mess, because I was a pop star who suddenly had two children and didn’t fit into this world. So actually it’s kind of exactly what it should have been,” she says, laughing. “Then my last album was emerging from the detritus of my first marriage.” A beat. “And we’ll see what happens with these songs!” Cue wide eyes and rictus grin.
I wonder if being a mother to now-teenage daughters has altered her outlook at all. Does she worry about them out there in the world?
“I try not to smother them,” she says. “I feel like I can try and shield them and protect them from things, but I don’t think that really works. A big part of what I’m doing at the moment creatively is for them. I need to show them that, yeah, we’ve been through something fucking devastating – twice now – and that I can get us through.” They’ve seen me in the depths of despair this last year and they have listened to my music and they are proud, I think.” (They don’t really understand the lyrical content, she says, “But their TikTok dance is ready!”)
“I feel like I often talk on the podcast about how fucking hard it is to be a mum,” she continues. “And people come to me and say, [she puts on a grouchy voice] ‘Imagine your children reading this.’ And it’s like, yes, I want them to know that so that they don’t do the same thing! You know? I felt totally gaslit by my mum about motherhood.” How so? “Well, she was like, ‘Oh, it’s easy, just throw it over your shoulder and everything’s fine.’”
And what about her personal life now? “Are you on the apps or are you in a relationship?” she fires back to me. “Because when you get to 40, you go into a different category and your selection is suddenly very different,” she says, her voice becoming a squeak.
PHOTO CREDIT: Francesca Allen
But this is moot: dating is not a priority until she has worked some things out. “Listen, I am in a period of self-discovery at the moment and I’m really trying to explore how I’ve got myself into certain situations in the past,” she says. “I need to unpack some things and break some patterns and probably talk to my therapist about my relationship with my dad.” You haven’t done that yet? I baulk. “I think we have some more work to do.”
By all accounts, it is hell out there in the world of modern love and dating. What exactly, in her opinion, has happened to men? “I think the internet happened. And I think the abundance of opportunity that the internet has created and the ease with which things and people are available is what happened.”
With a bit of distance, some rage has subsided. Looking back on her second marriage, she is able to say that “there were lots of good things” about it. “My kids had an amazing experience living in America for five years, and I have a lot of compassion for my ex-husband. I think we all suffer.”
And with that, it is almost time for Allen to get to the theatre, to transform into her role as a “convincingly brittle newlywed” as The Guardian will praise her performance come opening night.
But she is more excited to step back into the role she was born to play: musician. “When I feel like I’ve captured something well and it does something for me, but can also do something for others, I want to play it to people straight away,” she says. “It’s all I want to listen to.”
However difficult the road to making this record has been, she is thankful this is what has come out of it. Finally, she has something that is truly, authentically, her. “It feels like me, unquestionably,” she says, proudly. “It feels like my voice. I listen to it and I go, ‘Yeah, that’s me”.
There are a couple of reviews that I want to get to. The Guardian provided their take on West End Girl. Noting how it contains “these stylistically varied songs have melodies that sparkle”, anyone who has not heard it yet really needs to! This is a year when incredible women in music are releasing these very open, frank and personal records – Florence + The Machine’s Everybody Scream (out on 31st October) is another -, I think West End Girl will compel other artists to bare their scars, soul and experiences in music in a similar way:
“So West End Girl arrives in a very different and more welcoming climate to its predecessor. But although you can hear a Charli xcx influence on the fizzing, trebly synths and Auto-Tune overdose of Ruminating, and a whisper of PinkPantheress about the two-step garage-fuelled Relapse, West End Girl really doesn’t seem like an album made for opportune reasons. It feels more like an act of unstoppable personal exorcism. It appears to pick through the collapse of Allen’s second marriage so unsparingly, with such attention to vivid, grubby detail, that you have to assume the lyrics were reviewed by a lawyer. (She told British Vogue that the album references things “I experienced within my marriage, but that’s not to say that it’s all gospel.”)
While you can’t tell where poetic licence has been applied, its narrative arc traces accepting an open marriage along certain guidelines (“He had an arrangement, be discreet and don’t be blatant,” Allen sings on Madeline, “there had to be payment, it had to be with strangers”) only for the relationship to explode when it transpires that the husband isn’t abiding by the rules. There are confrontations with other women, a visit to an apartment where Allen (or her character) believes her husband is practising martial arts but where she finds “sex toys, butt plugs, lube” and “a shoebox full of handwritten letters from brokenhearted women”. There is a brief, unhappy attempt to beat him at his own game – on Dallas Major, she joins a dating app under an assumed name, but keeps repeating the phrase “I hate it”. It reaches a bitterly unhappy denouement: “It is what it is – you’re a mess, I’m a bitch … all your shit’s yours to fix.” It’s simultaneously gripping and shocking. There are moments when you find yourself wondering if airing this much dirty laundry can possibly be a good idea, impeccably written and laced with mordant wit though the lyrics are.
Obviously said lyrics will attract the lion’s share of attention. In an era where every pop song is combed through for inferences about the artist’s private life, Allen has dramatically upped the ante: certainly, Taylor Swift complaining that another star once called her “boring Barbie” seems pretty small beer by comparison. But there’s far more to West End Girl than just cathartic disclosure. The songs skip through a variety of styles: the title track’s orchestrated Latin pop; Beg for Me borrows from Lumidee’s 2003 R&B hit Never Leave You; Nonmonogamummy blends electronics and dancehall-influenced guest vocals by London MC Specialist Moss.
What ties the songs together beyond the story they tell is the striking prettiness of the tunes, which seem, jarringly, more evocative of a romantic fairytale ending than the anger and unhappiness the lyrics convey. And West End Girl seems to reserve its sweetest melodies for its bleakest moments. 4chan Stan is possessed of a wistful loveliness at odds with its internet basement dweller-referencing title; Pussy Palace – the one with the lyric about butt plugs etc – may well be the most musically addictive, hook-laden track here: it’s as if Allen is defying you not to hit rewind even if you don’t want to hear its squalid story more than once.
It’s hard not to wonder whether West End Girl is going to get the reception it deserves for its boldness and the quality of its songwriting: it would be a great pop album regardless of the subject matter. Perhaps some listeners will view it as too personal to countenance. Or perhaps fans who have grown up alongside Allen, now 40, will find something profoundly relatable in the story it has to tell about modern relationships. Underneath all the gory details, it seems to tacitly suggest that open arrangements are easily abused, usually by men, and that believing you’re above outmoded concepts of fidelity – “a modern wife”, as Allen puts it at one point – is no guarantee you won’t get your heart broken. We shall see. What’s for certain is West End Girl is a divorce album like no other”.
It is interesting what The Independent say in their review. How there must have been lawyers, friends and family wondering whether Lily Allen should release this album. West End Girl is not a confessional album at all. Instead, “it’s obliterative; an emotional post-mortem carried out in public, a death-by-a-million-cuts account of a thoroughly modern marriage breakdown”:
“Songs about cheating (“I can’t shake the image of her naked/ On top of you and I’m dissociated”), open relationships (“I don’t wanna f*** with anyone else/ Now that’s all you wanna do”) and sex addiction (“hundreds of Trojans, you’re so f***ing broken”) are best experienced raw, on their own terms. Inevitable comparisons to classic heartbreak pop albums written by thirtysomethings will seem wrong. Beyoncé’s Lemonade, after all, is mediated by marital reconciliation; Kacey Musgraves’s Star-Crossed made measured by the lack of betrayal; Adele’s 30 tempered by a few years of reflection. But the bewildered and wounded Allen wrote West End Girl in 10 days. It shows, in the best way.
This musical of deceit and suffering puts her in the starring role, seizing control of her narrative and holding little back. Those distinctive, creamy vocals sound sad and deflated, as if she’s processing in real time. Seven years since her last album, this intense story-driven format lets her sound sharper, smarter, and more clear-eyed than before.
The show opens with the jaunty title track – an unnervingly sunny bit of scene-setting. Allen’s narrator got her happy ever after, moved to New York for him, hesitated, then conceded when he talked her into a house that was too expensive. But all is not well. In real life, Allen starred in 2:22: A Ghost Story, playing a woman who suspects her new home, bought with her husband, is haunted. The irony is acute: art imitating life, or perhaps life catching up with art. Allen misses nothing, which is part of the problem for her narrator’s marriage.
Allen has said she drew from personal experience to write songs that feel universal, though that relatability only really lands in the final two tracks – and they’re two of her best. On the quietly triumphant“Let You W-in,” she lays out the album’s aim: “I can walk out with my dignity if I lay my truth out on the table.” What’s eerily universal is how easy it is, in love, to drown in someone else’s shame and mistake it for your own. On the bittersweet closing ballad “Fruityloop”, she serves herself a slice of responsibility: “I’m just a little girl/ Looking for her daddy.”
After two albums that defined mid-2000s British pop, Allen lost her grip on the pop star version of herself that once felt effortless. Sheezus and No Shame had the same attitude but lacked focus. The pain of this real-life breakup has given her something solid to attack with all her might, and West End Girl feels like the clarity she’s been writing toward for years. In 2025, Allen sounds newly alive in the contradictions we loved her for: acid-tongued and soft-hearted, ironic and sincere, broken again but alright, still”.
You wonder where Lily Allen will go next in terms of her music. Maybe the next album will see her in a relationship and in a very happy place. Perhaps something different altogether. It is clear how important it was for her to get West End Girl out. Recorded in ten days, this is such an urgent album. One that has received rave reviews and really stunned critics and listeners. I have been a Lily Allen fan for twenty years now. I think that West End Girl is her greatest work. It is clear that West End Girl is going to create ripples and conversation…
FOR a long time to come.