Narratively, it begins with the singer falling in love, moving to New York with her two daughters, and setting up home in “a nice little rental near a sweet little school”.
But the first signs of trouble begin when she’s cast in a West End Play (Allen received a Laurence Olivier nomination for her stage debut in 2:22 A Ghost Story, in 2021).
“That’s when your demeanour started to change,” she sings, as clouds gather over the breezy musical backdrop. “You said that I’d have to audition, I said ‘You’re deranged'”.
As the album progresses, the relationship continues to sour.
Her husband disappears for weeks on end, and Allen, or the character she is portraying, reluctantly accepts the conditions of an open marriage.
“He had an arrangement, be discreet and don’t be blatant / There had to be payment, it had to be with strangers.”
It all blows up when she finds text messages, and she says: “Is it just sex or is there emotion?”
In one of the album’s most brutal scenes, Allen, or her character, visits an apartment where she believed her husband was practising karate, only to discover a room scattered with sex toys and “a shoebox full of handwritten letters from brokenhearted women”.
When she finally ends the relationship, she’s bewildered and wounded by his indifference, wondering over and over, “why won’t you beg for me?”
It’s only on the two final tracks where she accepts the need to move on and burn her bridges.
“I will not absorb your shame, it’s you who put me through this,” she sings over a stripped-bare beat on Let You W/in. “I can walk out with my dignity if I lay my truth out on the table.”
