Lily Allen, West End Girl
It’s been 16 years since the peak of the Lily Allen experience. Her 2009 breakout album, It’s Not Me, It’s You, was cheeky, risqué, in your face. Hits like Not Fair, The Fear and F— You established her as a fun and provocative new age pop star, her catchy tunes buoyed by unapologetic sexuality and a killer sense of humour, like a British, brunette Sabrina Carpenter of the late-2000s.
The Lily Allen of 2025 is a very different proposition. She’s publicly weathered a series of storms over the past decade and a half, living out relationships, breakups, controversies, motherhood, and mental health crises under an unrelenting spotlight.
The British pop star’s first album in seven years dives into the, ahem, complexities of non-monogamy.Credit: Getty Images
West End Girl is Lily Allen’s first album in seven years, and it’s the most vulnerable and reflective her music has ever been. Written over a 10-day period in the same month she announced the end of her relationship with actor David Harbour, it’s an intensely personal and raw album. Channelling her hurt with surprising directness and painful detail, it’s a slightly chaotic meditation on sex, love, heartbreak and infidelity in the bright lights of New York celebrity.
The title track is a twinkling, theatrical introduction to the story that feels like the big opening number to a musical (perhaps intentional, given its references to Allen’s role in the 2021 play 2:22 A Ghost Story). It sets the scene for a relationship teetering on the brink, marital bliss eroding into distrust and fighting.
Allen released West End Girl with no singles and little fanfare for maximum impact.
There were no singles released prior to the record’s launch, but second track Ruminating is the closest the album comes to the kind of banger that might attract heavy radio play, its nu-disco reminiscent of Dua Lipa with a distinctly darker edge.
West End Girl is many things – a no-punches-pulled account of family breakdown, a rambling journal spilling out secrets and pain, bops galore – but one thing it certainly is not is an advertisement for non-monogamy.
