Lily Allen: West End Girl – A stunning autopsy of infidelity | Lily Allen

IIt’s been seven years since Lily Allen last released an album. No Shame was nominated for a Mercury Prize and reviewed much better than 2014’s Sheezus – not least by Allen herself – but it was also her lowest-selling album to date. You could have taken that as evidence of pop’s progress. In Britain, 2018 was the year in which George Ezra, Jess Glynn and Ed Sheeran, the well-mannered boy and girl, ruled. Allen seemed to be a symbol of a more chaotic and dissolute era. After that, Allen stepped away from music, focusing instead on what might be called a variety of interests, including acting, podcasting, releasing her own sex toy, and selling pictures of her feet to nerds on OnlyFans.

But pop music has a habit of evolving in a cyclical manner. When Olivia brought Rodrigo Allen onstage at Glastonbury in 2022, it highlighted just how profound her influence was on the young artist’s songwriting: you can trace a direct line between Allen’s spleen smile and expletives and the similar brand of frankness of Rodrigo’s breakup anthems. And Rodrigo is just one of a succession of younger female artists who claim Allen’s influence: Billie Eilish, Sabrina Carpenter, Charli XCX and Pink Panthers. If Lola Young gained five pounds every time she was compared to Allen, she would never need to work again.

So West End Girl arrives in a very different and more welcoming atmosphere than its predecessor. But although you can hear Charli xcx’s influence on the sizzle and trippy synths and overdose of Auto-Tune of Ruminating, and PinkPantheress’s whispers of garage-fueled two-step relapse, West End Girl doesn’t really sound like an album made for the right reasons. It’s like an unstoppable personal exorcism. He seems to be trying to address the collapse of Allen’s second marriage so relentlessly, with such attention to the vital and sordid details, that you have to assume the words have been reviewed by a lawyer. (She told British Vogue that the album references things “I went through during my marriage, but that doesn’t mean it’s all gospel.”)

While you can’t tell where poetic license was applied, its narrative arc traces the acceptance of an open marriage according to certain guidelines (“He had an arrangement, be discreet and don’t be squeaky,” Allen sings in Madeleine, “there had to be push, it had to be with strangers”) only for the relationship to implode when it turns out the husband isn’t playing by the rules. There are confrontations with other women, and a visit to an apartment where Allen (or her character) believes her husband is practicing martial arts but where she finds “sex toys, butt plugs, and lube” and “a shoebox full of handwritten letters from broken-hearted women.” There’s a brief and unhappy attempt to beat him at his own game – in Dallas Major, she joins a dating app under an assumed name, but keeps repeating “I hate that.” It comes to a sad, bittersweet conclusion: “This is it – you’re a mess, and I’m a bitch…all your stuff to fix.” It’s gripping and shocking at the same time. There are moments when you find yourself wondering if airing so much dirty laundry could possibly be a good idea, and it’s meticulously written and full of biting wit even though the words are.

Obviously, the said words will attract the lion’s share of attention. In an age where every pop song is scrutinized for inferences about an artist’s private life, Allen has upped the ante significantly: Taylor Swift’s complaint that another star once called her a “boring Barbie” certainly seems tiny in comparison. But there is much more to West End Girl than just cathartic revelations. The songs move through a variety of styles: the orchestrated Latin pop of the title track; “Beg for Me” borrows from Lumidee’s 2003 R&B song Never Leave You; Nonmonogamummy mixes electronics and Dancehall-influenced guest vocals by London MC Specialist Moss.

What ties the songs together beyond the story they tell is the stunning beauty of the melodies, which seem, starkly, more evocative of a romantic fairytale ending than the anger and unhappiness conveyed by the lyrics. And West End Girl seems to save its sweetest tunes for its sweetest moments. 4chan Stan has a melancholic beauty that belies its Internet basement-dweller title; “Pussy Palace” – which has a lyric about plugs and such – may be the most musically addictive, hook-laden track here: it’s as if Allen is daring you not to press rewind even if you don’t want to hear his miserable tale more than once.

It’s hard not to wonder whether West End Girl will get the reception it deserves for its boldness and the quality of its songwriting: it’s going to be a great pop album no matter the subject matter. Some listeners may find this to be too personal to accept. Or maybe fans who grew up alongside Allen, now 40, will find something relatable to the story he has to tell about modern relationships. Beneath all the gory details, he seems to imply that open arrangements are easy to abuse, usually by men, and that believing you’re above outdated notions of fidelity — “the modern wife,” as Allen puts it at one point — is no guarantee you won’t get your heart broken. We’ll see. What is certain is that West End Girl is a divorce album like no other.

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