Lily Allen Dives Deep Into Her Divorce from David Harbour on New Album West End Girl

Lily Allen has unveiled West End Girl, her first new album in seven years.

On West End Girl, Allen channels her frustrations and anxieties around her divorce from actor David Harbour, and (pretty much chronologically) dives into the various reasons their marriage fell apart. She goes into great detail; like on the title track, which captures Allen’s move to New York to be with Harbour before she’s quickly given an opportunity to move back to London to star in a West End play.

Soon after, Allen attempts to make peace with the idea that the man she married wasn’t exactly living up to her expectations and chafes at the idea of non-monogamy. “If it has to happen, baby, do you want to know?,” she sings, quoting her ex proposing an open relationship over the phone. “What a fucking line… This conversation’s too big for a phone call.”

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Allen then dives into the various issues that their “arrangement” brought up: the distance, the humiliation, the feeling like she’ll never be enough for him. She shudders at the realization that her home in New York was serving as a locale for her husband to cheat on “Pussy Palace,” and on “Madeline,” she confronts one of his mistresses: “I’m not convinced that he didn’t fuck you in our house,” Allen sings.

She also dives into topics including mental health and addiction (“Relapse”), the sacrifices she was willing to make to keep her relationship alive (“Nonmonogamumy”), the challenges of dating in her field, age, and circumstances (“Dallas Major”), and the messy fallout of divorce (“Let You Win”). She ends with a note of acceptance on “Fruityloop,” singing, “It is what it is, you’re a mess, I’m a bitch/ Wish I could fix all your shit, but all your shit’s yours to fix,” and hearkening back to the title of her lauded 2009 album by taunting “It’s not me, it’s you.”

Sonically, Allen collaborated with Blue May along with contributions from Kito, Jason Evigan, Hayley Gene Penner, Oscar Scheller, and many more. The album follows a more cinematic style, with some sweeping arrangements and meditating hues; there isn’t much dance pop or overly-bright modes throughout, and the beats on West End Girl slink, slide, and sizzle. Stream West End Girl below.

“I’m nervous,” Allen said in a press release of West End Girl. “The record is vulnerable in a way that my music perhaps hasn’t been before – certainly not over the course of a whole album. I’ve tried to document my life in a new city and the events that led me to where I am in my life now. At the same time, I’ve used shared experiences as the basis for songs which try to delve into why we humans behave as we do, so the record is a mixture of fact and fiction which I hope serves as a reminder of how stoic yet also how frail we humans can be. In that respect I think it’s very much an album about the complexities of relationships and how we all navigate them. It’s a story…….”

West End Girl is Allen’s first album since 2018’s No Shame. In the years since, Allen has been very active in the English theater world; she won a Laurence Olivier Award for her performance in 2:22 A Ghost Story in 2022, starred in the West End revival of Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman in 2023, and played the titular role in a recent adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler this year.

West End Girl Album Artwork:

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