Lily Allen’s album West End Girl is her first release in seven years and is now one of the most talked about albums in the past few weeks. Countless videos, memes, and discussions of how David Harbour’s PR team must be scrambling attempting to preserve his public image are surfacing, especially with the Stranger Things press tour ongoing. Allen and Harbour were married in 2020 and divorced early this year; however, until this album, it wasn’t public knowledge that he had proposed an open relationship, setting them on the path for divorce.
Lily Allen will start touring the UK in March 2026. Tickets were released on November 7th and sold out within minutes—a testament to how fantastic the album is. Allen’s album isn’t your average breakup album; there aren’t passing references to an amorphous affair or a mild slight towards their personality; West End Girl eviscerates Harbour’s public image.
The title song “West End Girl” begins with dreamy jazz music and the news that she got the lead in a play; this is in reference to her stage debut in 2:22 A Ghost Story in 2021. There are only occasional allusions to the first rumbles of unrest in their marriage: “You said I’d have to audition, I said ‘you’re deranged’ / and I thought / I thought that was quite strange.” The music suddenly cuts to one side of a phone call with the music bubbling in the background. It’s like being told devastating news, the background falling away, and all you can focus on is the choking back of tears.
What’s most impressive about this album is Allen apparently wrote and recorded it over ten days. The album bounces between the aethereal jazz-like sounds typically associated with Allen’s music to songs like “Ruminating”, which have heavy autotune, synth sounds, and a strong drumline. The killer line of that song being “If it has to happen, baby, do you want to know?”.
Some of the songs truly encapsulate the experience of heartbreak, such as “Sleepwalking”, which opens with a lullabylike beat and an almost whispered line “You won’t love me / You won’t leave me / You don’t touch me / Still so needy”. All the visualiser footage has a hazy cast, giving it a dreamlike quality, which matches the overall tone of the album perfectly; each one features Allen looking off into the distance vacantly. In “Tennis”, she sits on a bench looking off into the distance; two men walk past carrying a floral arrangement that says “husband” on their way to bin it.
The kicker of this visualiser is her being hit with a stray tennis ball. This song explores her discovering his affair with Madeline, apparently a reference to Natalie Tippet, who came forward claiming that she was Harbour’s affair partner. Many of the songs are jaw-dropping; some left me laughing out of sheer shock: “Pussy Palace” is possibly the most talked about song for this line: “Sex toys, butt plugs, lube inside / Hundreds of Trojans, you’re so fucking broken.” “Dallas Major”explores the challenges she faced attempting to partake in their non-monogamous arrangement; the song seems to nod to their drastically different situations: “I’m almost nearly forty / And just shy of five-foot-two / I’m a mum to teenage children / Does that sound like fun to you?” I truly urge you to listen to this album.
West End Girl is more than just a breakup album, it’s an exploration of varied sound and feels more like reading a diary than listening to an album. “Love and Light Madeline”