FEATURE:
The Best Albums of 2025
Lily Allen – West End Girl
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ONE of the best-reviewed…
PHOTO CREDIT: Charlie Denis
albums of this year also happens to be one of my favourites Lily Allen’s West End Girl is an astonishing album that is so powerful and open. My words will probably not do full justice, suffice to say that themes addressed include marital breakdown, including infidelity, betrayal, and the complexities of open relationships. I will end this feature with a review for West End Girl. I have been a fan of Allen since her 2006 debut, Alright, Still. See if a wonderful artist. Recorded in Los Angeles over ten days in December 2024, West End Girl reached number two in the U.K. I will return to British Vogue for a review of West End Girl. However, I will start out with them. I love how quickly the album came out. On 20th October, Allen announced that West End Girl would be released four days later. Journalists barely had any time to get their mind around it. The immediacy and lack of fanfare, I think, provides West End Girl more weight and importance:
“So why now? “I made this record in December 2024 and it was a way for me to process what was happening in my life,” she says, choosing her words with the same care you might use to, say, pick up the shards of a broken wine glass. Because what was happening in her life at that time was that her marriage to American actor David Harbour, star of Stranger Things and various Marvel movies, whom she had wed in Las Vegas in 2020 after meeting him on dating app Raya, was falling apart, amid reports of alleged infidelity on his part.
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.”
Harbour too is careful about what he says about their marriage. In conversation with GQ in April this year he would say only that “There’s no use in that form of engaging [with tabloid news] because it’s all based on hysterical hyperbole”.
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.
Listeners of Miss Me? will know that at the start of 2025, she had to take time off for her spiralling mental health. She wasn’t sleeping, she wasn’t really eating. (“I’ve had real problems with my food over the past few years,” she says, and in the thick of the break-up, “it got really, really, really bad.”) Having been sober for six years, it was the closest she had come to relapsing. “The feelings of despair that I was experiencing were so strong,” she explains. “The last time that I felt anything like that, drugs and alcohol were my way out, so it was excruciating to sit with those [feelings] and not use them.”
And so, for the first time in her life, she put herself into a residential facility. “I’ve been into those places before against my will and I feel like that’s progress in itself,” she says of her self-awareness this time. “That’s strength. I knew that the things I was feeling were too extreme to be able to manage, and I was like, ‘I need some time away.’” What was the sign that told her this was different? She looks at me. “That I wanted to die,” she says simply, letting the words hang in the air. She breaks the silence with an almost embarrassed laugh, like a tic.
For now she insists she is “really not in the same space that I was in when I wrote [these] songs. I have come a long way.” She got back into the “thick of recovery”, found a sponsor and started going to daily meetings again. Meditation, therapy and antidepressants have all helped. Yes, there are good and bad days, but, “I feel OK, actually,” she says, trying out the words to see how they feel. “Maybe the play has given me an outlet to express my rage”
I will move to an interview with The Times. Allen discusses West End Girl and the end of her marriage. The struggle to stay sober, and what comes next for her. A successful and brilliant stage actor, it seems like more music is at the forefront of her mind. The more you pass through West End Girl, different aspects come to light. The extraordinary lyrics. Smart, funny, frank, vulnerable and vicious, you do wonder how she will follow this album. In terms of the direction taken:
“I ask about some specifics in the album. In the song Tennis Allen describes spotting a message ping on her husband’s phone from another woman, called Madeline. Who is she? “A fictional character.” Is she a construct of others? “Yes.” Another song’s lyrics, which raise plenty of questions go: “We had an arrangement/ Be discreet and don’t be blatant/ It had to be with strangers.” Which suggests to me an unconventional marriage that allows flings, so long as they are within certain parameters.
“I just feel we are living in really interesting times — in terms of how we define intimacy and monogamy, people being disposable or not,” Allen says. “The way we are being intimate with each other is changing as humans … Lots of young women are not finding the idea of marriage or even a long-term relationship that attractive any more.”
But is that such a bad thing? At least there will be far fewer people stuck in loveless relationships. “Oh, I don’t know [that] it’s necessarily bad,” says Allen, whose own parents, the actor Keith Allen and the producer Alison Owen, divorced when she was four. “Lots of people from my parents’ generation stayed together for ever and were miserable. You didn’t have endless choice so you may have worked at something harder. But now you don’t have to.”
We meet in a members’ club in London, on a hot day that brings to mind her early hit LDN — “Sun is in the sky/ Oh why oh why would I wanna be anywhere else?” That was 2006, the second song from the vibrant, smart 21-year-old after her No 1 smash Smile.
Allen is 40 now and dressed for her new record’s mood in black, with shoulder-length black hair and a vape on the go. Right at the start she pops her phone down to record the interview; she has that defensive side to her, but mostly she is brash, funny — an open book you would find in the thrillers section.
She wrote West End Girl last December, in just ten days. “I was really depressed,” she admits. “I thought I didn’t have any good songs left. My writing had been really bad and it took something to happen in my life, for everything to be blown up, for me to be able to go, ‘Oh, here she is.’”
PHOTO CREDIT: Charlie Denis
Is there a part of her that would rather just cower away? “Well, traditionally in my life, when traumatic things happened, I’ve taken time to step away,” Allen says. “I certainly don’t think I could have got up on stage days after losing a child.” She has suffered a miscarriage and a stillbirth. “But that is probably more of an anatomical thing. And there are levels to the humiliation — right?”
West End Girl is fantastic: punchy, sad, funny, singalong. “It will piss off lots of people,” she says. I reckon that her break-up tales will win listeners’ sympathy. “Time will tell,” she replies, laughing. “I am a 40-year-old mother of two teenagers — it’s just not that big a deal.” Well, social media may disagree: this will be the most gossiped-about album for years, although Allen has no concerns about releasing it. The night before starting it, she wrote down 18 song titles — all of which stuck. “Nobody knew what was going on in my life,” she says. “So I got into the studio, cried for two hours and then said, ‘Let’s make some music.’ ”
Early on in West End Girl she says she wants to “lay my truth on the table”. So, with lyrics about subjects ranging from cheating to vasectomies, is it all true? “I don’t think I could say it’s all true — I have artistic licence,” Allen says, cautiously. “But yes, there are definitely things I experienced within my relationship that have ended up on this album.”
Now Allen plans on being a pop star again. She will tour West End Girl next year and hopes to be back in the studio soon, while taking a break from Miss Me?. More theatre will have to wait too. Her West End debut in 2021, 2:22 A Ghost Story — the play that sets off the marital breakdown in West End Girl — was well received, but reviews for Hedda were mixed (“Some good, some terrible,” is her summation). “Do I want to be a theatre dame?” she ponders. “No, not really. But it is a medium which I find exhausting, relentless but fascinating.”
She was sitting in the New York flat that she bought with Harbour when Olivia Rodrigo’s manager emailed a few years ago, asking Allen if she would appear with the pop star at Glastonbury. Her daughters said, “You have to.” The family went to Somerset. “It’s been years since I put out an album; they’ve never really seen me on stage,” Allen says. “Marnie thought that I was going to be a backing singer; their minds were blown. People went ballistic… Marnie said, ‘So, were you popular then?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I was quite — back in my day.’ But we’d been living in a bubble in Brooklyn.”
That bubble has burst but Allen says she is “OK”. How? “I’m financially OK,” she says. “I have a roof over my head and food in the fridge and my kids are doing well and those markers are huge.” She sung her song F* You with Rodrigo, directed at the US Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade. Who would she aim that song to now? “There’s not really anyone I’m that f*ed off with, personally,” she shrugs. “I can’t think of anyone I let get under my skin these days”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Francesca Allen for British Vogue
I feel it is important, for this series, to get words from the artists about their album. It adds something that my words cannot. I could not find any interviews with Dave and his new album, The Boy Who Plays the Harp, but there are (fortunately) interview with Lily Allen. Rather than end with British Vogue, I think I shall come back to them next, as there is another review I feel is best to finish with:
“Rules for an open marriage. Conversations with his mistress. Reflections on a secret stash of sex toys. What sounds like scraps from someone’s Notes app that would usually be locked behind an iPhone passcode is actually a snapshot of what has been laid bare by Lily Allen in her new album, West End Girl. With critical acclaim across the board, this is a break-up album like no other, one that was written and recorded over just 10 days following the end of her four-year marriage to the actor David Harbour.
Speaking to British Vogue, Allen said of the album, her first in seven years: “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 said. Still, regardless of how much of the album straddles fact or fiction, the material is deliciously raw, and it’s impossible not to take Allen’s lyrics seriously.
In “Pussy Palace”, she sings about visiting an apartment that her protagonist believed her husband had been using for martial arts, but instead discovers “sex toys, butt plugs, lube” and “hundreds of Trojans”. In “Madeline”, the narrator confronts a younger woman sleeping with her husband (“Do you two ever talk about me? Has he told you that he doesn’t love me?”) and addresses insecurities that every woman can relate to: “I’ve gotten old, gotten ugly”. Then there’s “Beg for Me”, a song articulating the primal needs we’re sometimes afraid to say out loud, particularly in today’s single positivity era (“I wanna feel held / I wanna be told I’m special and I’m unusual”), and “Let You W/In”, a defiant anthem about reclaiming the narrative from an ex who silenced you: “I’m sick of carrying, suffering for your sins.”
On many occasions, Allen’s lyrics sound less like words from globally available songs than they do voice notes recorded for a close friend. But it’s because of this, along with the insatiable synths and meticulously crafted hooks, that the album deserves all the praise it’s getting. In today’s hyper-manicured, PR-obsessed celebrity climate – where artists are often pretending to be open rather than being so – hearing a woman in the public eye being so unabashedly vulnerable, honest and explicit feels exciting and reassuring. Allen is singing about fears, traumas, and anxieties that many of us have experienced and yet, out of shame, often feel compelled to keep to ourselves.
While creating art out of heartbreak is nothing new – break-up albums abound now as much as they always have – nobody is doing it with quite so much guttural grub and grit. The level of detail is as shocking as it is thrilling. This is especially true when you consider the litany of misogynistic tropes that have prevented female artists from addressing those who’ve harmed them. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, particularly if she’s a writer. And yet, so often we dilute our stories down to make ourselves seem more palatable, in fear of coming across as vengeful, malevolent, or even just a little bit angry. Say what you like about female empowerment – in 2025, these are still modes of expression many women feel compelled to quieten, even when they’re completely warranted.
All this feels particularly revolutionary in the context of Allen’s tempestuous relationship with the media. In the earlier days of her career, the singer was eviscerated by the tabloids, frequently having to fight off false stories while navigating a relentless churn of articles about her body, relationships and even her children. To this day, Allen remains a target: consider the recent opprobrium she received after admitting to not knowing how many abortions she’d had. In this climate, West End Girl feels like a triumphant clap-back, one that serves as a reminder of Allen’s talents, yes, but also as a woman in the public eye who deserves our compassion and respect. I’ll be listening on repeat all weekend”.
I am ending with this five-star review from The Independent and their take on a modern masterpiece. Even though there were complaints around the price of pre-sale tickets and the lack of dates, Allen is taking her new album on the road next year. I know there will be a lot of fans there supporting Allen. It will be amazing to hear West End Girl on the road:
“Across the early, easy-breezy songs, a narrative begins to take shape: the husband proposes an open relationship, and she agrees… reluctantly. “I tried to be your modern wife/ But the child in me protests,” could be the finest lyric in pop this year, lamented through Auto-Tune over a mournful dubstep beat. The humour grows darker as he takes liberties with the rules of their arrangement. On “Tennis” Allen repeatedly demands, “Who the f***’s Madeline?” over Stepford Wives–style “dinner’s ready” production. Madeline – the “Becky with the good hair” of West End Girl – doesn’t escape unscathed. The next track, named after the pseudonym under which she’s saved in the husband’s phone, is a flamenco-meets-spaghetti-western showdown: a direct address, an interrogation over text, gunshots echoing behind each plea for truth. A Valley Girl voice cuts in, assuring Allen it’s “only sex” and signing off with a cloying “love and light”.
Sitting squarely at the heart of the album – track seven of 14 – “Pussy Palace” serves as the point of no return. Allen describes throwing her husband out of their marital home in New York, sending him to his separate West Village apartment. When she goes there to drop something off, she’d assumed it was a dojo (one of many eyebrow-raising moments, considering Harbour is trained in jiu-jitsu). Instead, she discovers what she says is his base for frequent sex. “So am I looking at a sex addict (sex addict, sex addict, sex addict)?” she asks, her voice hollow.
The listener has barely recovered when, over the old-Hollywood strings and delicate finger-plucking of the following ballad, “Just Enough”, Allen wonders whether her husband has fathered a child with someone else. Again and again, she pecks at herself in songs where she feels too old, too exhausted to be desirable. She even books a facelift in her late thirties to win his love (“I just want to meet your needs/ And for some reason I revert to people pleasing,” she admits breathily on “Nonmonogamummy”).
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”.
Without doubt one of the best albums of this year, you just know that West End Girl is going to pick up awards. I think it will get a Mercury nomination and there will be other honours. Anyone who has not heard the album needs to listen straight away, as I guarantee it will hit you hard. There is humour and wit among lyrics that must have been so hard to write. Perhaps exorcising and cathartic, you have to admire Lily Allen’s bravery and strength to get them out, as she is documenting some incredible trough times. I know that others will be able to relate to West End Girl and emphasise with Allen. One of our greatest and most treasured artists, we all hope that there is nothing but happiness and pace for Lily Allen going forward. It is the least she deserves. Take some time to properly experience…
THE extraordinary West End Girl.