Lily Allen Album Review: “West End Girl”
In late October, two days after British singer-songwriter Lily Allen unexpectedly released her confessional fifth album, “West End Girl,” about the breakdown of her marriage to actor David Harbour, the couple’s Brooklyn Brownstone album went on the market for $8 million. The house is located in Carroll Gardens, as Saturday Night Live’s Stephon says: Everything: Wall-to-wall white tiger-print carpeting, swan taps, and commodes modeled after those at Versailles. in Architectural abstract Tour of the place, from 2023 The couple shows off the sauna and cold plunge in the backyard. They wanted their floral, carpeted bathroom, which has a fireplace and armchair, to have “a kind of Parisian feel, a place where you can feel like you’re reading Proust and smoking Gitanes in the bathtub, or something like that,” Harbor said. Dream!
Allen appears to be singing about home on the first track of “West End Girl,” which begins sweetly, with breathy, fairy-tale-like optimism, and ends with the couple renegotiating the terms of their marriage. “And now we’re all here, we’ve moved to New York / We found a nice little rental near a pretty little school,” Allen sings. “Now I’m looking at four- or five-story houses / And she found us a brownstone, and I said, ‘Do you want that?’ It’s yours.” She makes it clear that this is the thing he wanted: “I could never stand it / You were pushing it forward / You made me feel a little embarrassed.” All is well until Allen, or her narrator (the line is blurred), gets a role in a West End play and leaves for London. Just as she arrives, her husband calls and appears – though not explicitly stated in the song – to ask for an open marriage. The narrator reluctantly agrees. “No, I’m fine, I want you to be happy,” she says.
What follows is a breakup album for the ages, in which the stunning, almost operatic demise of a marriage is laid out like a salted chicken. All the subtleties are there: letters with her husband’s mistress, the discovery of a stash of sex toys, an impending relapse, and a spiral of anxiety. On the album’s sexiest song, “Pussy Palace,” Allen sings about finding a Duane Reade bag full of butt plugs and lube in an apartment that she thought, but inexplicably, was some kind of dojo. (“Hundreds of Trojans, you’re so broken / How could I fall into your double life?”) There’s a poppy, upbeat song about her failed attempts so far after a relationship begins to unravel, under the pseudonym Dallas Major. “My name is Dallas Major, and I’m coming to play/Looking for someone to have a good time with while my husband’s gone,” she sings with brittle insistence. “I’m almost forty, I’m just shy of five foot two / I’m a mother of teenage kids, does that sound fun to you? / ‘Cause I hate it here / I hate it here.”
Good. What more could you ask for? Are we in the presence of high art? Maybe not. Was I humming “Pussy Palace” while I picked up my toddler from daycare? definitely. These are uninhibited, fun songs that talk about a primal, if uninteresting, passion for dirt. (Come on, rock bottom! It’s fun in here!) Compared to “The Life of a Showgirl,” Taylor Swift’s paltry final album, which fans delved into almost futilely for hints about her personal life, Allen offered a veritable buffet of revealing details. “We agreed to be discreet and not to be blatant,” she sings about the terms of her marriage. “It had to be pushed / It had to be with strangers.” Swift gave us a scarf, but Allen hung up all her dirty laundry.
How much of all this really happened? It’s hard to know for sure. Last month, in a discussion about the album, British Allen said Vogue magazine“There are things on record that I’ve experienced…but that doesn’t mean it’s all gospel.” Allen and Harbor reportedly broke up around December 2024, and Allen wrote songs during that period, she said, “as a way for me to process what was going on in my life.” There’s a piece of music called “Tennis,” where the narrator is reading texts on her husband’s phone from someone named Madeleine. “Who the hell is Madeleine?” She sings. Then in the next song “Madeline” reads what appear to be letters from Madeline to her. (Madeleine ends her speech with the infuriating “Love and light, Madeleine.”) Is Madeleine real? Recently, Allen told… Sunday Times Madeleine was a “fictional character”, but she admitted she was “created” by real people.