Lily Allen's new album West End Girl is making waves for its raw, unfiltered take on marital collapse—think of it as the "scorched earth breakup album of the year," as the headline on Elias Leight's take in the Wall Street Journal puts it. The work is loaded with lines such as "I'm here for validation and I probably should explain/ How my marriage has been opened since my husband went astray." Among other things, the songs chart infidelity, heartbreak, and Allen's near-brush with relapse.
Allen herself describes the album as inspired by the implosion of her marriage to Stranger Things actor David Harbour, though she's quick to add that West End Girl is "a mixture of fact and fiction." At Pitchfork, Harry Tafoya writes that the album "is too concerned with honoring moment-to-moment feelings of hurt and betrayal to really reach for a mature overview of the breakup." But, adds Tafoya, "what the songwriting lacks in conceptual development, it makes up for in raw emotion and narrative thrust."
As for Harbour, his take is that the tabloid frenzy is mostly "hysterical hyperbole." Allen's knack for sharp, conversational lyrics isn't new—she's been skewering bad romances since her 2006 debut—but West End Girl takes things to a new level of excruciating detail. Maura Johnston of Rolling Stone notes that "much of West End Girl finds Allen taking a brutal inventory of the scars she amassed while her marriage was falling apart; it couldn't have a happier ending than one where she's beginning to remind herself of who she could be."
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Allen hasn't released an album since 2018, but this return has clearly struck a nerve: 10 of her tracks landed in the UK Spotify Top 50 this week. Fans and friends point to her honesty as the secret sauce—she's "very sweet—but very raw and real," says Allen's former podcast co-host Miquita Oliver.
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