All couples in love are alike; each shattered couple, however, has been shattered in its own way. When you fall in love with someone, your friends tolerate you talking about them and fawning over them. But when someone fucks you over—when they break your heart—we want the details. We want to know that Taylor Swift left her scarf there at his sister’s house and that Alanis Morissette went down on him in a theater. We want to know every gory little piece of what happened to you. Show us the knife wound. Show us the knife.
Part of creating anything is understanding which parts of you are interesting to others, and Lily Allen knows that in a breakup what people want (be they friends or fans) is details. On Friday, with just a few days' warning, Allen dropped a 14-song, 44-minute album called West End Girl. It’s an ideal breakup album because it’s petty and unconcerned with fairness. It throws all the dirty laundry right out onto the street.
The first song, the titular “West End Girl,” sounds sweet and like a fairytale. “And now we're all here, we've moved to New York / We've found a nice little rental near a sweet little school / Now I'm looking at houses with four or five floors / And you've found us a brownstone, said 'You want it? It's yours,'" Allen sings, while angelic production swells behind her voice. For the first two minutes of the song, she sets up the story. The singer moved to New York, bought an insane brownstone she couldn’t afford with her partner, then got offered the lead in a play. Her partner was dismissive of this achievement, and then she went back to London to perform it.
All of these lines, for anyone who cares about Lily Allen and knows anything about her, read as very autobiographical. Just so that we’re on the same page, let’s do a brief recap. In 2018, Lily Allen got divorced from her last husband, Sam Cooper. In 2019, she matched with David Harbour on the cursed dating app for rich and hot people, Raya. David Harbour is an actor who is best known for playing the scruffy cop on Stranger Things that a lot of white women were horny for in 2016. He’s also been in some Marvel movies, but frankly that’s not my business. Then, like many people who were in brand new relationships in 2019, they fast-tracked because of the pandemic. Engagement rumors swirled all spring. In September 2020, TMZ reported the two had gotten married. You can see where this is headed, can’t you? In November of 2021, Lily Allen made her stage debut in a West End thriller play called 2:22—A Ghost Story.
At the 2:06 mark of “West End Girl,” we hear the sound of a FaceTime starting, and then only Lily’s end of a conversation. It begins with “I miss you,” and leads to a sad “Oh okay, well, I mean it doesn’t make me feel great.” You can feel the halting pauses where someone else must have been speaking. You can feel her heartache. “No. I’m fine. I’m fine,” she says. “I want you to be happy.”
And then the album continues. It’s a brutal, slapping album filled with direct quotes. “And then you came out with this line, so crucial. Yeah, 'If it has to happen, baby, do you want to know?'” she sings on “Ruminating.” "'Why aren't we fucking baby?' Yeah, that's what you said," she sings on “Sleepwalking.” It’s building—the discontent, the concern, the worry.
By the fourth song, “Tennis,” there’s another woman. The lyrics tell us that he showed her a photo on Instagram, and a text about tennis popped up from a woman named Madeline. “Who’s Madeline?” Allen sings over and over as the song ends. “Who’s Madeline?” One song later, on a song called "Madeline" (lol), the narrator texts Madeline. She tells Madeline, and also us, the rules of engagement she had set up with her husband: “Be discreet and don't be blatant / There had to be payment / It had to be with strangers / But you're not a stranger, Madeline.” And then ... as the outro of that song, Lily Allen reads what seems to be a text from Madeline to her.
Here are some other things we learn about this story from the lyrics of the album: He told Madeline that Allen knew about the whole situation and had given her consent (a lie). Because of all of this, Allen considered relapsing (she is sober). The West Village apartment she thought was his “dojo” was actually a “pussy palace” where she found “a Duane Reade bag with the handles tied / sex toys, butt plugs, lube inside.” (The intro to that song, "Pussy Palace," sounds an awful lot like the intro music to Stranger Things.) She discovered a receipt from a shopping trip to Bergdorf Goodman he took someone else on in May 2024. They tried opening the relationship. She booked a facelift. They talked about vasectomies. She wanted it to work. Tried. Failed. Wrote this album to process it.
The entirety of Allen's marriage’s collapse is laid out, beat for beat, in music. The songs are not built with pop choruses and meant for radio play. The album is a story, and the story is about getting fucked over so badly that you have no choice but to exorcise the demon from your body with art. According to The Times, she wrote the album last December in just 10 days. “Nobody knew what was going on in my life,” she told The Times. “So I got into the studio, cried for two hours and then said, ‘Let’s make some music.’” And now, well, everyone knows.
Allen, the daughter of an actor and a producer, has been covered in British tabloids since her break-out single “Smile” in 2006. Now, she is the tabloid. The story is being told by her, from her perspective, with her as the hero. And because of that, there is no hemming and hawing. This is not a mature breakup album. She did not wait two years and work through her feelings about the bad thing that happened to her, creating art from a place of former anger that still exists but feels softer, more managed. Albums like Lemonade, Red, and The Weight of These Wings carry the longing for a different version of the past that comes with time. There is none of that here. There is no remove between Allen’s album and her pain.
West End Girl is captivating not only because of the voyeurism it offers, but also because of how raw it sounds. There is a real, thorny honesty filled with vulnerability and pain. As more and more art feels like it is made specifically to sell, West End Girl feels like an album the artist had to make for herself to move on. That's the kind of art I want to listen to: art that means something to the person who created it.
