‘There’s a scene at the start of Lily Allen’s 2011 documentary From Riches To Rags when the newly-’retired’ musician is seen completing one last pop star duty before she gives up her mic.
Barely holding back tears as she sweeps the 2010 Ivor Novello Awards, picking up Songwriter of the Year and Best Song Musically and Lyrically for second album ‘It’s Not Me, It’s You’ and its celebrity culture-dissecting lead single ‘The Fear’, there’s the sense of the then-25-year-old finally being taken seriously for her craft, just as she’d had enough and decided to pack it all in. “[‘The Fear’] is about feeling lost in so many ways,” she sniffs, accepting the gong, “and this has made me feel quite found, all of a sudden.”
Fast forward 15 years, two marriages, multiple career changes (from actor to podcaster to Only Fans content creator) and God knows how many still-fixated tabloid column inches, and the context may be wildly different but the righteous, validatory narrative feels somewhat familiar.
Once more, Allen has found herself out in the emotional trenches of life and written her way out of it to the sound of a world remembering just how good she can be.‘West End Girl’ – Allen’s fifth studio album, announced on Monday, released this morning, and already hailed as a fearless, victorious comeback – arrives as an eye-poppingly unsparing account of a marriage broken by infidelity, and a woman running the emotional gamut of betrayal, confusion, self-flagellation and something resembling acceptance. Her first new material since 2018’s ‘No Shame’, she told Perfect Magazine that she had been trying to write in the interim, but none of it had landed; “[I was writing] observational stuff about the internet and the world,” she said. “It just seemed really obvious and crap.”
Conversely, ‘West End Girl’ was penned in 10 days, and the emotional exorcism of it all bursts out of the record in jaw-droppingly unfiltered fashion. Though she has described it as a work of autofiction – part autobiographical truth; part poetic license – the album is very evidently rooted in the deterioration of her marriage to Stranger Things actor David Harbour. A blow-by-blow, chronological narrative, it plays out like an episodic drama: gripping, edge of seat stuff made all the more so by the familiarity of the two ‘characters’ at its centre. Already, you’ll have read about Allen’s most damning lyrics: the bag with “sex toys, butt plugs, lube inside” of ‘Pussy Palace’, or the cold fashion in which ‘Ruminating’ introduces the idea of an open marriage – “If it has to happen, baby, do you want to know?”
But it’s the way Allen has played her cards, staying away from the internet and the hungry gossip mill until now, waiting to reveal her hand in one incredible artistic mic drop, that’s her true power move.Long demonised by the tabloids from her early days as a party-loving teenager and through the two decades since, Allen is all too aware of the forces ready to jump on any piece of information and the relatively minimal tools she has to combat them: silence and creativity.
On penultimate track ‘Let You W/in’ she puts it simply: “All I can do is sing / So why should I let you win?” Later she reveals the record’s underlying conceit: “I can walk out with my dignity, if I lay my truth on the table.”
Messy, funny, unfiltered truth has, of course, always been the singer’s MO, but on ‘West End Girl’ more than ever she deploys it in smart, stylish bombs. The one-two punch of ‘Tennis’ and ‘Madeleine’ – a deceptively sweet melody that reveals the idea of the other woman, followed by a dramatic, flamenco-infused back and forth – is gasp-worthy storytelling. Allen’s unique, signature mix of pretty top lines, crystalline vocals and cutting lyrical observations has never been more potent than on the revolted ‘4Chan Stan’ or the finger-picked, string-laden sadness of ‘Just Enough’ (“Look at my reflection, I feel so drawn, so old / I booked myself a facelift, wondering how long it might hold”). You can easily imagine a world in which she dropped these ideas mid-chat opposite Miquita Oliver on their podcast Miss Me. They would get picked up by the nefarious ends of the press, repeated and weaponised against her, and the cycle would continue. But ‘West End Girl’ is that rarest of things: an album of someone’s most intimate secrets, laid bare to the world, that doesn’t even sound like gossip – it sounds like a triumph.
