Album Review: West End Girl by Lily Allen

This extraordinary comeback record belongs in the long list of great break-up albums, but it’s also one of the best pop albums of the year “Bet you rue the day you kissed a writer in the dark.” That’s a line from a Lorde song of course, but it’s probably a lyric that actor David Harbour has been identifying with a lot this week. Lily Allen has never been afraid to be overtly personal in her songs, but her fifth album, given a surprise release at the end of October, picks over the dissolution of her marriage to Harbour in explicit, sometimes excruciating detail. At times, it makes Taylor Swift‘s songs about leaving scarfs at exes’ houses seem almost the model of discretion.

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On October 24, Lily Allen surprised the world by releasing her fifth album (and first in seven years since her 2018 effort No Shame). The surprise release of a brand new album by one of the most successful and notoriously controversial British pop stars of the last 20 years would be news enough in and of itself. However, once it landed on streaming platforms, listeners were absolutely gobsmacked by its stark and frankly brutal lyrical content.

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The tables have turned: now, 20 years on from her debut album, she's been hired full-time as a teacher at the public Pop Academy (downtown division), guiding a new generation of stars as they navigate heartbreak, career injustices, and the uphill battle of being undervalued in an industry that still underpays and underplays the girls and gays. With fifth studio album West End Girl, Allen returns to show the kids how it's done, strutting through the inner-city hallways, mashing gum and blowing bubbles. West End Girl isn't going open-world or making any real attempts at thematic well-roundedness.

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Her signature contemporary pop twinned with stark and witty lyrics has cultivated an entire sub-genre since the mid-00s. The current 'Y2K' revival on social media, spearheaded by people barely born during that time, is dominated by spoken word pop once dominated by Allen. There are countless pop girls wanting to replicate what she can do so effortlessly.

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When Lily Allen first announced details of her fifth album 'West End Girl' by giving just four days' notice before its release, there was perhaps the sense that this record would be a bit revealing. What couldn't have been prepared for in that space of time, though, is just how plainly and vulnerably this album would lay out the most gut-wrenching tale of heartbreak and betrayal. For those who've been tuned into the Londoner's non-musical movements of late, it will not come as a surprise to learn that Lily has been going through it recently.

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Out of the many thousands — surely tens of thousands — of albums I've listened to in my time, I can't recall one that had me on the edge of my seat from the first moments to the last on first listen the way Lily Allen's new "West End Girl" did, almost as if it were a suspense movie. The tension doesn't come in wondering about where the record's narrative is ultimately headed; as you may have heard, this is a divorce record with a capital D. My inability to sit back in my chair came from just savoring every confessional line and wondering what the hell she was going to tell us in the next one to top it.

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Lily Allen's pen has long proved itself to be one of UK pop music's sharpest tools. A songwriter who broadened the lexicon of the charts, she turned sexual dissatisfaction into one of the 00s defining ear-worms . New album 'West End Girl' is her first in eight years , a record prompted by relocation and heartbreak. Blurring the lines between fact and fiction, it's lyrically brutal - at times, not so much a character assassination as a drive-by shooting worthy of Top Boy .

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Early on in Lily Allen's West End Girl, a concept album that recounts the end of the English singer's open marriage to actor David Harbour, I was reminded of Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy's book The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships, and Other Freedoms in Sex and Love. One of the authors' zeal for polyamory seems to be a trauma response from repeated abuse by men, making the book's arguments for open relationships less persuasive. (A more level-headed case for non-monogamy is made in Christopher Ryan and Caclilda Jethá's Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality.

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