Photo by Nicky J Sims/Getty Images for Live Nation
Lily Allen hasn’t released an album for seven years. In that time, she’s had more careers than Barbie on steroids: West End star, comedy actress, podcaster, memoirist, even sex-toy designer. But fans, as much as they might have enjoyed their Womanizer vibrator (six functions for tailor-made orgasms!), really missed the music.
We got a sliver of Allen’s old stage presence when she joined Olivia Rodrigo at Glastonbury in 2022. The girl in the prom dress, who’d vaulted to fame at 21, had become an elder stateswoman of music before she’d even reached 40. A whole generation of stars had grown up listening to Alright, Still and It’s Not Me, It’s You as classics. And the legacy is already palpable: we wouldn’t have Rodrigo’s Sour without Allen’s acidic noughties pop.
Allen’s initial starburst faltered with her third album Sheezus, released on her 29th birthday. She admits it was “a mess”, and said that trying to fit into the pop world with two young children didn’t quite work. But No Shame, released in 2018, was a gnarly and nuanced record of the end of her first marriage.
West End Girl, her latest album, handles the breakdown of her second. She got hitched to Stranger Things actor David Harbour in 2020. By 2024, we were reading reports of his infidelity. In the press, Allen stayed tight-lipped about the split. In the album, she lets loose. Sex toys, butt plugs, Trojans and all.
Listening to West End Girl is like sitting down for dinner with a friend you haven’t seen in years. A friend with no filters, no boundaries, who’s trying to tell you everything that’s happened in the last half decade before you’ve even looked at the menu. She’s showing you the texts, playing the voice notes. “We need more time!” you tell the waiter.
You are meant to listen to it as an album, from beginning to end. Across the 14 tracks, Allen tells an intricate, intimate story of a woman scorned. She made her name with slam dunk break-up songs like “Smile”, and West End Girl has no shortage of shade. On “Sleepwalking”, she sings “You let me think it was me in my head / and nothing to do with them girls in your bed.” On “4Chan Stan,” she spits, “You’re not even cute.”
The album is genuinely funny. On “Tennis”, Allen keeps asking “Who the fuck’s Madeline?” to a sunny, tinkling, everything-is-abolutely-fine melody. On the next song, “Madeline”, she channels the voice of an annoyingly reasonable, irritatingly American “other woman”: “Our relationship has only ever been about sex, I can promise you that this is not an emotional connection… Whenever he talks about you it’s with the utmost respect.” Oh do shut up, Madeline.
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But this album is much more than a savage takedown. On “Dallas”, Allen explores what it’s like to online date as a well-known, still married, mother of two: “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.” On the closing ballad “Fruityloop”, she admits, “I’m just a little girl / Looking for her daddy.”
It’s easy to sneer about Allen’s endless ventures away from the studio. But this album could only have been made by a Renaissance woman. It brings together the candour of a podcaster, the humour of a comedy actress, the drama of a West End star. In an age where artists feel increasing pressure to churn out the hits, this album reflects the importance of taking a break. Allen, who’s squeezed about five lives into her four decades, knows you should only write when you have something to say.
[Further reading: Taylor Swift is totally in control]
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