Talk Your Shit, Lily Allen!

Talk about art as catharsis: Her new album, West End Girl, is the master work of a woman scorned.

Like everyone else in the free world, I slapped on West End Girl by Lily Allen yesterday and was thrust down a rabbit hole so deep at such velocity, I screamed aloud the entire way.

West End Girl album cover. Illustration: Nieves González

Made with gifted, about to be overbooked producers Blue May & Alessandro Buccellati, this record is an infectious, smooth-sounding confection of a confessional divorce banger that spills more tea than the best Real Housewives finale imaginable.

Talk about storytelling; this record’s got NARRATIVE, people. Meant to be consumed as a whole, it’s a complete, gripping, aural tale, each chapter a song, set to simple drum and bass rhythms and shimmering synths that ride along the peaks and valleys of a cohesive story told through melodies. Allen’s soft, sweet, lilting voice glides along each earworm with ease, but the confessional lyrics in this, her 5th album, slice through the various events of her marriage to actor David Harbour like a sword.

The title track, a lilting bossa nova called “West End Girl,” describes packing up her kids and moving to Brooklyn to settle into married life before going to London to act in a play. “Ruminating” is a shimmery, bouncy song that captures the sleepless mental ping-pong of trying to process a conversation with a long-distance partner who says they’re no longer satisfied with just you, its intro featuring a one-sided simulated FaceTime. Melodically, “Sleepwalking” serves up a vintage “Beauty School Dropout”-style melody while processing the dichotomy of still wanting your estranged beloved after a betrayal: “You made me think it was me in my head/And nothing to do with them girls in your bed/You made me your Madonna/I want to be your whore.”

Then, the gaslighting really kicks in—something so many women can relate to. “Tennis,” another singsong confessional, captures the loneliness of finding clues to a marital betrayal on Instagram. Lyrically, she’s processing the liminal space women experience when the tectonic plates of their foundational relationship are shifting away from them. Ending with “Who the fuck is Madeline?” we slide into the next track, “Madeline,” (said to be fictional, but the internet already figured it out), a flamenco guitar-tinged track detailing a face-off with the questionable woman she suspects her man caught feelings for. “He told me it was just in hotel rooms/We had an arrangement/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.” Then Madeline tells her side of the story. Ugh.

“Relapse,” a mellow dance track, uses beats set to voicetune to express the struggle to stay sober when you’ve fallen into hell: “I tried to be your modern wife/But the child in me protests/I need a drink, I need a valium/You’ve pushed me this far/I need to be numb/If I relapse, I could lose it all.” To the shimmery synths and easy beat of “Pussy Palace,” Allen describes heading to her estranged husband’s West Village apartment to drop off his meds, only to find it ground zero for his numerous extramarital exploits. She realizes he’s dealing with an addiction of his own: “Duane Reade bag with the handles tied / Sex toys, butt plugs, lube inside / Hundreds of Trojans, you’re so fucking broken / How’d I get caught up in your double life?” It then eases into the chorus: “I didn’t know it was your pussy palace (x4) / I always thought it was a dojo (x3) / So am I looking at a sex addict (x4)?”

Of course, it took no time at all for the Internet to find said pussy palace, according to The Tab.

She really goes there, wrestling with feelings of abandonment with such exertion you can’t help but sweat while listening. To a melody constructed around a looped sample of Daft Punk’s “Veridis Quo,” boundaries and lines are crossed in “4chanStan,” as she describes unearthing literal receipts proving her spouse had formed a legit connection to someone outside of the agreement of their open marriage. She confronts him: “Why won’t you tell me what her name is?/What, is she famous?/Why won’t you tell me?/What a sad, sad man/It’s giving 4chanStan.” “Nonmonogamummy” (with Specialist Moss), a reggae-tinged banger in which she chides her disloyal partner for opening their relationship, will go down in history as one of the best song titles ever innovated.

Over a sparse arrangement of plucked guitar and strings, “Just Enough” is a melancholy, heart-wrenching detailing of how she suspects her man fell in love with somebody else and got them pregnant, and how fragile she feels in the wake of his desertion: “Booked myself a facelift/Wondering how long it might hold/I gave you all my power/Of how I’m seen through your eyes.” Every woman who has been breadcrumbed can relate to the chorus: “You give me just enough to hold onto.” Following a lilting bass, Allen confesses “Dallas Major” as her online dating alias in another infectious recount of trying to date through an open marriage when you don’t really want to. “Beg for Me” is all about that feeling when you know a relationship is dead and the other person won’t even fight for you.

The victory lap, “Let You Win,” is all about the process of writing this record, when an artist and a woman knows the most powerful thing she can do to regain her dignity is to shout out the truth through her art. “All I can do is sing/So why should I let you win?/I will not absorb your shame/I can walk out with my dignity/If I lay it on the table.” The final track, “Fruityloop,” makes peace with the travesty and tragedy of the death of their relationship with a sense of self-reconciliation, chronicling the moment a woman refuses to absorb the blame for her philandering husband’s betrayal.

Allen told The Times UK she went into the studio last winter and recorded the album over just 10 days when she was depressed: “I thought I didn’t have any good songs left. My writing had been really bad, and it took something to happen in my life, for everything to be blown up, for me to be able to go, ‘Oh, here she is.’” She used the record as an outlet for her pain. “Nobody knew what was going on in my life,” she says, “So I got into the studio, cried for two hours and then said, ‘Let’s make some music.’”

This record is such a successful piece of work because it seduces you into listening to the entire journey, each song a consecutive chapter in a page-turner of a novella. Because both Allen are Harbour are famous enough to breed familiarity into your brain, we feel as if we’ve been let in on the true Hollywood story of a couple we know from the block (for a brief period of time, they actually were my neighbors).

West End Girl isn’t the first confessional break-up record, and it won’t be the last. But it’s gratifying AF because Allen pulled off what so few women have the opportunity to do. To empower herself and work through the pain, she created a masterful, confessional work of art while exposing every facet of her heartache and snatched back control of her personal narrative in the process—the ultimate victory for any public figure. We can’t get enough of it because a) the record is genuinely really FCKNG good and b) she allows us behind the curtain in a way we, the public, never get to be.

My very favorite thing about this record and Lily Allen’s resulting victory lap is, she is a 40-year-old mother of two teenagers who put out what is sure to be a number one record. How many 40-year-old women, who have not made records in years, get to experience a musical resurgence like this? In the youth-driven world of pop music, it’s unheard of. She is a MUTHR, UNFCKD, and I couldn’t applaud more fervently.

Haven’t listened yet? What are you waiting for?

xo

MF