I dropped EVERYTHING to listen to this album
Review of Lily Allen's "West End Girl"
West End Girl—Lily Allen
Released October 24, 2025
Wow wow wow. I knew by the second track of casually listening to this album that I needed to write about it immediately. I didn’t even know that much about Lily Allen before this, apart from “Smile” and that was only because it was covered in an episode of Glee. But after listening to this album and seeing reviews saying she’s back and true to form, I’m left asking myself if I’ve been missing out on Lily Allen this whole time? Has she always been like this, and I mean that positively. Between the sound of this album and the writing, and that gorgeous album cover which I’m convinced is already a classic, I’m thoroughly impressed. I just hope we can see through the drama and the tea of it all and appreciate this for the incredible pop album it is.
This album marks Allen’s return to music after seven years away. As the daughter of comedian and actor Keith Allen, Lily first started gaining attention for her music on MySpace in the early aughts, followed by her first single “Smile” released in 2006 when she was only 21. From there, Allen became known for her “singular musical style — clever, ferociously honest lyrics hiding amid a sing-song London accent and sugary sweet melodies.” Because it was the early ‘00s, Allen was often “eviscerated by the tabloids, frequently having to fight off false stories while navigating a relentless churn of articles about her body, relationships and even her children,” and garnered a reputation for being “all tulle, trainers and attitude,” loud-mouthed, and bratty. Over the course of her five album career, this most recent release being her fifth, she’s sold over four million albums, has won three Ivor Novello awards for songwriting and a Brit award. Her fourth album, 2018’s 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.” By that point in time in pop music, Allen “seemed symbolic of a messier, mouthier era” and not in line with “the well-mannered boy/girl-next-door pop of George Ezra, Jess Glynne and Ed Sheeran.” So for the next seven years, Allen threw herself into other projects, “including acting, podcasting, launching her own sex toy and selling photographs of her feet to fetishists on OnlyFans.” Her appearance in 2021 as the lead role in 2:22 A Ghost Story earned her an Olivier nomination for Best Actress. The moment she found out she landed the role and would need to be back in London for rehearsals is the backdrop against which this album opens, beginning the story of the end of her second marriage to Stranger Things actor David Harbour.
Allen and Harbour married in 2020 after meeting on the dating app Raya and moved with Allen’s two daughters from her first marriage to New York. The couple were featured in a video for Architectural Digest in 2023 in which they showcased their Brooklyn townhouse. They announced their separation earlier this year after four years of marriage. Allen surprise announced her fifth studio album West End Girl on October 20th to be released later that week on October 26th.
This is truly an album that requires you to listen in order. The narrative arc and way that each song is like the next chapter in a book makes this one of the most enjoyable listening experiences I’ve had this year.
The album follows from the opening of the marriage through the agreement of certain guidelines to the eventual explosion “when it transpires that the husband isn’t abiding by the rules.” There’s “confrontations with other women, a visit to an apartment where Allen (or her character) believes her husband is practising martial arts” but is where she thinks he brings his dates. There’s a moment where Allen considers relapsing in her recovery from previous addictions, and there’s a moment where she turns inward and “pecks at herself… she feels too old, too exhausted to be desirable.” Then there’s the classic grief processing, the denial where she tries to get on dating apps and tries to pretend that’s what she wants, but ultimately hates it, the anger on “4chan Stan,” where she calls him a “coward” and says that he’s not even cute, there’s the bargaining where she lays all the sacrifices she made to be with him on “Nonmonogamummy,” like moving to New York. There’s depression in “Let You W/In,” before finally acceptance on “Fruityloop.”
For some listening to the album, the fourteen tracks felt like they were “rehashing the same subject matter, [and] the shocks begin to wane.” But I disagree, instead feeling like each track is integral to the story. The title track, which also opens the album, really sets the scene. The light, bossa nova “The Girl from Ipanema”-esque sound gives the feeling like this should be the animated title sequence of a show like The Nanny. But then the happy-go-lucky tune is interrupted by the familiar modern sound of a Facetime call, which changes everything for the album. We hear a one-sided conversation, from which we can infer Allen is being asked to enter into an open relationship, despite her hesitation to do so. From there, we go on a journey with Allen, as she “walks through every grievance, revelation and epiphany possible, piecing together the unfurling heartbreak” which we know eventually ends in divorce. But between that phone call on track one and the final moments of the album, Allen really “dives into the various issues that their ‘arrangement’ brought up: the distance, the humiliation, the feeling like she’ll never be enough for him.”
The album changes again half-way through with track seven, “Pussy Palace.” From there the depth of betrayal becomes that much more, leading to Allen getting to a place that we rarely see in this story we’ve seen play out over and again: she makes peace with the fact that her former partner “is a mess/I’m a bitch” and that as much as she may wish to fix him, it’s ultimately his responsibility to fix himself.
There’s not a song I didn’t like on this album, particularly because of how they built off each other, but my favorites include the run of “Tennis,” “Madeline,” “Relapse,” “Pussy Palace,” and “4chan Stan,” as well as “West End Girl” and “Dallas Major.” I was equally impressed with the writing across the entire album, but particularly on “Sleepwalking.”
There’s a great theatricality to this album, particularly in the scene-setting of the title track and “Pussy Palace.” I also loved how throughout “Tennis” we’re introduced to the character of Madeline, and then the following song is titled “Madeline.”
This is such a strong pop album, but even within pop it has further dimension. There’s elements of flamenco, bossa nova, as well as a return to Allen’s previous sonic influences like “UKG [UK garage], rave, [and] slick electronic pop.” On “Beg for Me,” there’s a particular sonic reference to Lumidee’s R&B song “Never Leave You,” which I and other elder Gen-Zs might know from its use in Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (2004). Allen is even sonically referencing herself and her previous work on “Madeline,” which has a “sonic ode to 2009’s ‘Never Gonna Happen.’”
Despite obvious parallels to Allen’s real-life, she is insistent that it’s a work of autofiction, meaning that while it is in some part autobiographical, “that’s not to say that it’s all gospel.” It’s also not without its bent or bias. This isn’t a case carefully laid out with evidence from both sides to help us make our decision as to who’s in the right and who’s wrong. It’s very obviously from Allen’s perspective and she’s not exactly a reliable narrator, which is part of the album’s power “in the way it clearly presents itself as one side of the story: a woman trapped in her own head.” We as the audience don’t quite know exactly what is true, which allows “us to share in Allen’s claustrophobia and paranoia” and builds tension until we get some resolution in the final track.
This really is a very modern love, or rather modern breakup album. It’s really Allen unpacking and relearning a lot about herself, almost even more than it is about her ex-husband. It’s about “how easy it is, in love, to drown in someone else’s shame and mistake it for your own,” and it’s about Allen’s “deep-rooted issues with rejection and abandonment which I’ve been tussling with for most of my adult life.” It’s also, unfortunately, yet further evidence for my theory that artists don’t make their best work when in happy, loving relationships. I hate for this to be the case, but this album is yet another example.
As quickly as this album was written, in ten days, it’s not album that feels rushed by any means. There’s a real sense of necessity here, like “the feelings of despair that I was experiencing were so strong,” but instead of turning to drugs and alcohol like she might have in the past, which was “excruciating to sit with those [feelings] and not use them,” she turned to writing as “her way of coping, of healing, and just maybe, of settling scores.” But she’s not writing vindictively to get back at her ex-husband. This isn’t a revenge album. It’s in some part for Allen to feel validated, “I want to feel like it’s OK to feel the things that I’m feeling and to be angry about the things that I’m angry about. I want someone to go, ‘Yeah, that is fucking confusing!’” But largely what Allen is doing on this album is for her two daughters, “I need to show them that, yeah, we’ve been through something fucking devastating – twice now – and that I can get us through.”
For an album that generated “as many headlines breaking down the contents of the record as there were actual reviews of the music,” but I think it deserves more than it’s going to get. Let’s be honest, the internet is kind of starting to ruin pop music. Every release is picked through for gossip and discoursed to death before being discarded and tossed aside for the next big scandal. Before this album, we were dissecting The Life of A Showgirl, and before that it was Man’s Best Friend, and in no time another album will come to take this one’s place. But for now, this album will be “chewed up for ‘lore’ and spat out again, forgotten in the tap of a Deuxmoi IG story.” I’m not interested in this album for the gossip, I’m interested in the story Allen is telling.
It’s obvious that Allen didn’t make this album “for opportune reasons,” like trying to play the easter egg game. If that’s what she was trying to do, she would have been more vague in her details to draw out the discourse. But instead she gave us “every last gory detail,” which “feels more like an act of unstoppable personal exorcism,” and an album “designed less as gossip fodder than it is to be a full stop on the conversation.” As she’s “unconcerned with radio or streaming playlists,” and not trying to appeal to trends or TikTok creators, there’s an intimacy that is more like “voice notes recorded for a close friend” than it is an album meant for getting back at her ex. This album is what I think Swift’s Tortured Poets Department was trying to be and should have been. But despite Swift’s usual practice of easter-egging details to feed the rumor mill, I fear she’s become too “hyper-manicured, PR-obsessed” and is “often pretending to be open rather than being so” to accomplish what Allen does here. But as Allen has never sought the approval of the industry, she is less so playing the game and more conducting “an emotional post-mortem carried out in public.” Some will say it’s too personal or too much, but what is art for if not to talk about the things we can’t otherwise just talk openly about?
Allen has been known to British audiences for a long time, debuting twenty years ago now. And in those last twenty years, Allen has garnered quite a reputation for herself as a very outspoken, loud-mouthed, shocking figure in British pop culture, a favorite amongst tabloids looking to exploit her every word and every move to turn the public against her. But the 2020s are a very different time than the 2000s, particularly when it comes to celebrity culture and especially in regards to what grace we hold for women in the public eye. Artists like Lily Allen walked so that artists like Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish, Sabrina Carpenter, Charli XCX, and Lola Young could simply exist. PinkPatheress has gone on record saying “Lily Allen made sounding like yourself feel cool.” There’s a direct line that can be drawn from “Allen’s splenetic, sweary Smile and Rodrigo’s similarly forthright brand of breakup anthems.” Rodrigo, always one to wear her influences on her sleeve, even invited Allen on stage during her Glastonbury performance in 2022 to perform Allen’s “Fuck You,” “which they dedicated to the US supreme court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade.” Charli XCX likewise has much she owes to Allen, from her “unbarred, conversational delivery” to her “kind of ironic detachment that makes any suggestion of their being ‘hysterical’ much harder.”
Being that Allen has been in the public eye since the early ‘00s, she is no stranger to misogynistic tabloid culture, which still follows her to this day. She’s been called “too outspoken” and in her early 20s, she was often criticized for “what was deemed to be inappropriate behaviour from a young lady.” Even when she wrote in her 2018 memoir My Thoughts Exactly about her experiences with “her troubled relationship with her dad, being assaulted by music industry executives, suffering a miscarriage, being stalked relentlessly by a mentally unwell man,” she says she was met with an attitude of “we need to put this person back in a box. We cannot abide this stuff being said” by the press and the British public. But as she sees it, she’s trying “not to titillate but to truth-tell,” and she’s only doing exactly what she’s seen other male celebrities do “and get nothing but praise.”
There’s also the fact that Allen has always written about sexuality, particularly in this current “pop landscape where female desire is shock-spectacle and designed to scandalise, [but] even the biggest artists can struggle to articulate it in direct terms.” With this album in particular, Allen is simply trying to share “her version of events in the most authentic way she knows,” and is still being met with misogyny. Just like when Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour made some reviewers feel bad for Joshua Bassett, Allen’s telling of her own experience is apparently too harsh and too real for some reviewers, with one saying “it almost…makes you feel sorry for David Harbour,” adding to that a “but not quite.” I do wish Rodrigo had used her power over her fans to pull back some of the negative public pressure off Bassett, who ended up going into heart failure and sepsis from the stress, but in the case of Allen and Harbour, David Harbour is a grown man. Allen has made it clear that there is artistic license taken and not everything is verbatim fact, but if any part of what she has to say in this album, about her own experience, isn’t true and is damaging his character, then he has every right to defend himself. But to paint Lily Allen as the aggressive party just for simply telling her story is the latest in a long line of a “litany of misogynistic tropes that have prevented female artists from addressing those who’ve harmed them.” Too often, women “dilute our stories down to make ourselves seem more palatable, in fear of coming across as vengeful, malevolent, or even just a little bit angry.” Even in all the strides we have made in the last twenty years since Allen’s debut, even with outspoken women artists like Rodrigo, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Charli XCX, Billie Eilish, and so many more, the fact is that “in 2025, these are still modes of expression many women feel compelled to quieten, even when they’re completely warranted.”
What’s that saying, “You can die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become a villain?” Well in Lily Allen’s case, she suffered the abuses of the tabloids throughout her early ‘20s and survived long enough to see a new generation break the cycle that took many of her friends and contemporaries. In the current nostalgia for the early ‘00s, one thing that has not been brought back is the incessant hounding by paparazzi. Not only have they not been missed, but there’s been larger, ongoing discussions about the damage done to young celebrities, particularly young women, at the hands of the press and paparazzi. Allen said that “When I was 19, I would wake up and there would be 20 guys on my doorstep with long lens cameras and they would follow me all day long.” That, which in part led to Allen’s struggles with addiction, was also part of the problem that caused many of Allen’s friends like Peaches Geldof, Amy Winehouse, and Caroline Flack to not be here to see this reckoning.
As the current pop culture is looking back to the Y2K era for inspiration, Allen herself isn’t stuck back in 2006. Now in her early 40s, she is benefitting from the more enlightened culture surrounding mental health, addiction, self-worth in dating, and self-care of the 2020s. For her fans “who may have grown up alongside her,” the story Allen is telling is very much one about modern relationships—the desire to be the cool girl and the modern wife that’s just one of the guys and down for whatever, even if that means going along with things she’s not really okay with for the sake of her man. We’ve seen this idea unpacked before, particularly in Gillian Flynn’s cool girl monologue from Amy Dunne’s perspective in Gone Girl (2012) or Kacey Musgraves’ song “good wife” from 2021’s star-crossed. Allen’s album is those ideas presented by both Flynn and Musgraves expanded. Except the end in which, instead of Allen falling on her sword as so many women have had to do before her, she comes to the enlightened, therapy-speak-inspired conclusion that, sure she has her problems and he has his, but it’s ultimately not her job to fix him. To come to that conclusion twenty years ago would have made Allen the villain, but now it makes her one amongst many women who aren’t putting up with bad behavior from men anymore.
For as long as Allen has been a divisive figure in British pop music and culture, she’s long been known for her distinctly “blunt, witty — and distinctively British — confessional style of storytelling.” And this gift of hers as a songwriter shines through in full force on this album. Of her writing, Allen said that she believes her job “is to write about what I see and what I’ve learned and what I feel and what I know. I then sing out those words using the best voice I can. It’s not world-class, but it’s honest and it’s true.” Obviously the writing for this particular album comes from a deeply personal place, as she’s processing the end of her second marriage throughout these songs, but in drawing from her personal experience, she’s instilled a universality into these lyrics. I’ve not been through what she’s been through, but I can feel what she’s feeling through the cleverness and clarity of her lyrics.
I know what I’ve said before about not liking crassness just for shock value, but to me, that’s not what’s happening here. For one, this bluntness has long been part of Allen’s writing style, so it doesn’t feel like she’s departing from her known style in order to shock us into paying attention to her. As well, she’s obviously writing from such a real place of pain and who am I to police how people express themselves when they’re processing and writing about such personal and such painful things that have happened to them.
But Lily Allen is more than just a songwriter, she’s also a pop star. And as “much of her power lies in her delivery as well as her lyrics,” everything that makes a Lily Allen album distinctively hers is still present in this. From her “gut-punch lyrics, now with added years on the clock,” to her “pretty, lilting falsetto, not the strongest among her peers, but just as effective,” and her “sweetly sung melodies with lyrics that aren’t quite what they seem,” this album is proof that the best of Lily Allen is back, even after her seven year hiatus.
Pop music is not devoid of its break-up and divorce albums, and it’d be all too easy to make comparisons between Allen’s entry into this subgenre and some of the classics—Beyoncé’s Lemonade (2016), Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours (1977), Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black (2006), or either of Adele’s 21 (2011) or 30 (2021). And hardly anyone does a divorce album better than a country girl. Kacey Musgraves’ star-crossed (2021) and Kelsea Ballerini’s Rolling up the Welcome Mat (2023) are amongst the most well-known for their crossover pop appeal, but my personal favorites also include Carly Pearce’s hummingbird (2024) and Amanda Shires’ Take It Like A Man (2022) (although technically not an official divorce album, her most recent release is the definite divorce album, but all the signs are there on Take It.) But I wouldn’t be surprised to see this album continue to be talked about in the future, both for its lyrical storytelling as well as its production and musical value.
Even more than I love the impeccable writing or the juicy drama, the music itself is so good. Even without the lyrical content, it would still be a “great pop album regardless.” In fact, I think this album does what many big pop albums in the last year haven’t been able to do. It seems like having the combination of production and lyrics is a tall order, particularly in the cases of The Life of a Showgirl (2025) or Man’s Best Friend (2025) where we appear to get one and not the other. (For me, Tortured Poets Department still has neither) But this album really delivers on both.
There’s a “breezy instrumentation,” and a “striking prettiness of the tunes” that is in stark contrast to the heaviness of the album’s theme and is “more evocative of a romantic fairytale ending than the anger and unhappiness the lyrics convey.” Across the album there are “these stylistically varied songs [which] have melodies that sparkle,” and which keeps the listener on their toes and keeps the album from becoming too same-y. But in Allen’s true-to-self shocking fashion, she seems to save the album’s “sweetest melodies for its bleakest moments.” The turning point of the album, “Pussy Palace,” is like the final nail in the coffin for Allen in realizing that her marriage is over, but for the listener, it’s also the song with the craziest lyrics, but “may well be the most musically addictive, hook-laden track here.” All of this goes to show the intentionality behind this album. As much as it was created as a means of processing what she’d been through, this album is tight, concise, and economic. At no point does anything feel not carefully considered or thought out, and that’s everything from the lyrics to the production to the pacing.
Despite its late release, this album is already generating potential for best pop album of the year, and I’d have to agree. Few albums this year have wowed me right off the bat like this one did. It feels complete, like Allen’s “strongest and most cohesive album.” And for all of its heavy thematic content, it’s “swift and weightless despite the jaw-dropping details.”
It’s only been out a few days, but this album has been exclusively what I’ve been listening to since I first pressed play. I really hope people will keep listening to this album after the novelty of the drama wears off because it really is so good and I can’t say enough good things about it. I’m so ready for this to become a classic of the divorce girl genre.