It is seven years since Lily Allen last released an album. No Shame was Mercury-nominated and far better reviewed than 2014’s Sheezus – not least by Allen herself – but it was also her lowest-selling album to date. You could have taken that as evidence pop had moved on. In Britain, 2018 was a year that the well-mannered boy/girl-next-door pop of George Ezra, Jess Glynne and Ed Sheeran held sway; Allen seemed symbolic of a messier, mouthier era. Afterwards, Allen stepped away from music, concentrating instead on what you’d have to call a diverse portfolio of interests, including acting, podcasting, launching her own sex toy and selling photographs of her feet to fetishists on OnlyFans.
But pop has a habit of developing in a cyclical way. When Olivia Rodrigo brought Allen on stage at Glastonbury in 2022it highlighted how deep her impact on the younger artist’s songwriting ran: you could trace a direct line between Allen’s splenetic, sweary Smile and Rodrigo’s similarly forthright brand of breakup anthems. And Rodrigo is merely one among a succession of younger female artists claiming Allen’s influence: Billie Eilish, Sabrina Carpenter, Charli xcx, PinkPantheress. If Lola Young had a fiver for every time she was compared to Allen, she would never need to work again.
So West End Girl arrives in a very different and more welcoming climate to its predecessor. But although you can hear a Charli xcx influence on the fizzing, trebly synths and Auto-Tune overdose of Ruminating, and a whisper of PinkPantheress about the two-step garage-fuelled Relapse, West End Girl really doesn’t seem like an album made for opportune reasons. It feels more like an act of unstoppable personal exorcism. It appears to pick through the collapse of Allen’s second marriage so unsparingly, with such attention to vivid, grubby detail, that you have to assume the lyrics were reviewed by a lawyer. (She told British Vogue that the album references things “I experienced within my marriage, but that’s not to say that it’s all gospel.”)
While you can’t tell where poetic licence has been applied, its narrative arc traces accepting an open marriage along certain guidelines (“He had an arrangement, be discreet and don’t be blatant,” Allen sings on Madeline, “there had to be payment, it had to be with strangers”) only for the relationship to explode when it transpires that the husband isn’t abiding by the rules. There are confrontations with other women, a visit to an apartment where Allen (or her character) believes her husband is practising martial arts but where she finds “sex toys, butt plugs, lube” and “a shoebox full of handwritten letters from brokenhearted women”. There is a brief, unhappy attempt to beat him at his own game – on Dallas Major, she joins a dating app under an assumed name, but keeps repeating the phrase “I hate it”. It reaches a bitterly unhappy denouement: “It is what it is – you’re a mess, I’m a bitch … all your shit’s yours to fix.” It’s simultaneously gripping and shocking. There are moments when you find yourself wondering if airing this much dirty laundry can possibly be a good idea, impeccably written and laced with mordant wit though the lyrics are.
Obviously said lyrics will attract the lion’s share of attention. In an era where every pop song is combed through for inferences about the artist’s private life, Allen has dramatically upped the ante: certainly, Taylor Swift complaining that another star once called her “boring Barbie” seems pretty small beer by comparison. But there’s far more to West End Girl than just cathartic disclosure. The songs skip through a variety of styles: the title track’s orchestrated Latin pop; Beg for Me borrows from Lumidee’s 2003 R&B hit Never Leave You; Nonmonogamummy blends electronics and dancehall-influenced guest vocals by London MC Specialist Moss.
What ties the songs together beyond the story they tell is the striking prettiness of the tunes, which seem, jarringly, more evocative of a romantic fairytale ending than the anger and unhappiness the lyrics convey. And West End Girl seems to reserve its sweetest melodies for its bleakest moments. 4chan Stan is possessed of a wistful loveliness at odds with its internet basement dweller-referencing title; Pussy Palace – the one with the lyric about butt plugs etc – may well be the most musically addictive, hook-laden track here: it’s as if Allen is defying you not to hit rewind even if you don’t want to hear its squalid story more than once.
It’s hard not to wonder whether West End Girl is going to get the reception it deserves for its boldness and the quality of its songwriting: it would be a great pop album regardless of the subject matter. Perhaps some listeners will view it as too personal to countenance. Or perhaps fans who have grown up alongside Allen, now 40, will find something profoundly relatable in the story it has to tell about modern relationships. Underneath all the gory details, it seems to tacitly suggest that open arrangements are easily abused, usually by men, and that believing you’re above outmoded concepts of fidelity – “a modern wife”, as Allen puts it at one point – is no guarantee you won’t get your heart broken. We shall see. What’s for certain is West End Girl is a divorce album like no other.
This week Alexis listened to
Daniel Avery – The Ghost of Her Smile ft Julie Dawson
The British dance producer explores what he calls “the shoegaze and ethereal corners inside my skull” in the company of NewDad vocalist Dawson to blissful effect.
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