After seven years of silence, the British musician details in depth a destructive relationship with her former partner, David Harbour (“Stranger Things”), turning the pain into a captivating concept album. West End Girl shows Allen’s strength as a witty and unmasked creator, preferring burning truth over polished hits.
If the idea that sunlight is the perfect disinfectant were a religion, Lily Allen would be its pope. This was true when she was the ideal it-girl of early 2000s Britain, with hits like Smile and The Fear richly expressing the inner world of a young Londoner with a notable family background (father an actor, mother a film producer, brother also known from acting), and it remains true now, especially given the difficult crises she experienced in her first decade, including breakups with two partners. Listening to her last two albums, No Shame from 2018 and West End Girl, released after seven years of silence, it’s hard not to recall the legend of Taylor Swift settling scores with exes through songs. Next to Allen, Swift is just a rabbi.
While No Shame dealt with the slow, sad disintegration of a relationship a fate, unfortunately, common to many couples West End Girl is a chilling diary of coping with a toxic, lying, sex-addicted partner. The fact that he is famous in his own right, the star of “Stranger Things” and “Thunderbolts,” multiplies the effect: Allen knew this album would be talked about, not just because of its successful production. But she had 50 tons of shock, disappointment, and offense to release from her chest, and she turned these feelings into a hammer of equal weight. The blow will feed the grandchildren of the internet.
West End Girl is both thematic and chronological: it begins with the first episode (Allen takes a role in the West End and receives a call from Harbour wanting to restart the relationship) and ends with her new path (realizing Harbour violated every agreement between them). This linear movement gives the songs a power reserved for other arts like TV and cinema (almost requiring a “spoiler alert”): Allen narrates events step by step, presents a villain (Harbour), secondary characters (his lover), plot twists (Harbour turned another apartment into what Allen calls “Pussy Palace” in the song of the same name), and a moral lesson. The result is an album easy to listen to in one sitting, but deliberately not designed for singles (none were released) and unlikely to return Allen to the charts.
Even here, there is something refreshing: Allen, always at the forefront of pop writers, uses total honesty and authentic connection to light musical styles like a Negroni with a splash of soda to show the power of the album format, especially when the target audience is not Gen TikTok. This does not mean the songs don’t work individually: Nonmonogamummy starts with a lively guitar riff and continues with a fun rhythm (despite the bleak lyrics), Relapse evokes sweet, old British dance tones (with a touching text about fear of falling back into addiction), and Beg For Me works perfectly in soundtracks for heartbreak dramas and dating shows that refuse to settle for AI imitations.
For her fantastic autobiography, one of the best in the genre (including an amazing story where she was brought a glass of water and a glass of vodka and, due to sinking into alcohol addiction, could no longer distinguish between them), Allen titled it My Thoughts Exactly. West End Girl honors this principle: it demands a place for intelligence, wit, sharpness, and confession in a pop world where even exposure feels engineered. Allen has paid for this in the past and will continue to do so: songs like Tennis and Pussy Palace (with a fairly groundbreaking Bat-Flag reference) are first backstage drama and only then musicality, nuance, and humor. But Lily Allen has lived enough to know: first sunlight, then everything else.
