What we learned about Lily Allen and David Harbour’s breakup, thanks to her new album West End Girl
With West End Girl, music may have finally reached peak divorce album.
On her fifth record, released Oct. 24, English singer-songwriter Lily Allen appears to debrief the dissolution of her four-year marriage to Stranger Things actor David Harbour in often eyebrow-raising detail.
In interviews, Allen said the album, her first in seven years, came together in around two weeks last December, when she was processing emotional turmoil in her personal life — and that it’s a work of both fact and fiction.
However, there are lyrics too specific to ignore when it comes to her relationship with Harbour, including details of their New York home and their growing estrangement. The couple’s separation was confirmed in February.
West End Girl arrives in the wake of recent chart-topping divorce albums like Kelly Clarkson’s Chemistry, Adele’s 30 and Kacey Musgraves Star-Crossed. But none of those albums go quite so far as this one.
Over the course of 14 tracks, Allen tells the story of a seemingly idyllic life that painfully unravels due to infidelity and other betrayals. The result is a vulnerable album that combines raw emotion with a broad, electronic sound.
Together, Allen and Harbour, who were married in September 2020, were something approaching pop culture darlings — or at the very least an internet fascination. In the comments section of the famous 2023 Architectural Digest video tour of their Brooklyn brownstone home — which has been viewed more than eight million times — viewers discuss how unexpectedly cool and quirky the couple was, and how happy they seemed together.
That same home is featured heavily in the title track of West End Girl. Allen sings about moving to New York, getting a brownstone and having it decorated by Billy Cotton — all of which rings true.
From there, she sings about how her unnamed partner’s “demeanour started to change” after she “got a lead in a play” in London, which appears to reference Allen’s foray into acting in West End productions like 2:22 A Ghost Story and The Pillowman in recent years.
WATCH | The 2023 tour of David Harbour and Lily Allen’s New York City townhouse:
The story that Allen fills in between these recognizable facts goes something like this:
With some reluctance, Allen agrees to an open relationship arrangement with her partner while she is away from him. There are signs they’ve grown distant, or he is not as supportive as he once seemed, but she tries to ignore them — until she no longer can. Lies and insecurities erode trust, until feelings of paranoia and being taken for granted win out. Allen then finds evidence that he broke the rules of their arrangement, and confronts both him and the woman he’s been with.
Before the album was released, there were rumours the couple’s marriage was in trouble.
Last year, Allen made headlines for sharing on the podcast Miss Me? that she would sometimes go days without speaking to her husband. In a different episode of the podcast, she mused about whether she had incidentally kink-shamed Harbour for turning down some of his bedroom requests in the past.
Now, listeners appear to be getting a close-up of what their relationship — and breakup — was like behind closed doors.
Perhaps the most shocking track is P—y Palace, where Allen’s sadness turns to rage. She tells her partner to “go to the apartment in the West Village instead,” calling to mind Harbour’s other Architectural Digest tour from 2019, of his New York loft apartment. In the song, Allen goes there to drop off some of his things and says she finds what appears to be the home of a “sex addict”: “Sheets pulled off the bed, they’re strewn all on the floor / Long black hair, probably from the night before,” she sings.
Fans online have been basking in the gossipy revelations since the album’s release.
“The entire west end girl album is like being on facetime to your best friend post-breakup and they finally tell you all the diabolical things their man did which they didn’t tell you about before!” reads a post on X by user @jwstarling.
“I love when women air out their dirty laundry,” said user @savahannaISme.
Critics are also praising the album. Rolling Stone gave it four stars and called it “powerful.” In Harpers Bazaar, writer Louis Staples said it “may very well have changed the chemistry of [my] brain.” In a post on X, culture writer Bradley Stern said it’s “a surprise end-of-year stunner and an instant [album of the year] contender.”
As the album nears its end, Allen suggests what her new normal may look like.
On Dallas Major, she sings about using dating apps again and includes a reference to her Vegas wedding to Harbour.
She doesn’t shy away from the inevitable post-breakup emotional roller-coaster on Beg for Me, but by the final track, Fruityloop, her feelings have calcified into a resolve that she sums up in the chorus: “It’s not me, it’s you.”
