No matter how much you brace for the end of a relationship, nothing prepares you for when the floor suddenly gives out. On the title track of her fifth album, West End Girl, Lily Allen recreates the moments when the ground began to shift beneath her marriage. Over jazzy guitar and the coo of what sounds like animated bluebirds, the singer first settles into a super-charmed life: a seamless transatlantic move, fantasy real estate, a plum leading role landed audition-free in a West End play. If she were merely grateful, she’d be Gwen Stefani, but because this is Lily Allen, we’re conditioned to expect there’s a bucket of pig’s blood in the offing. As the music recedes, she picks up a FaceTime call, and the mood deflates. We hear only one side of the conversation, but we’re led to imagine she’s being asked for a time-out from being a couple. Because she doesn’t know how to paper over the chasm that’s suddenly opened, she ends the call with a shaky “I love you” before the strings rise up to torment her one more time.
By now there are enough half-reported facts to assemble a composite of the end of Allen’s marriage to American actor David Harbour. They include an awkward red carpet interview, an ominous-sounding love note, and not one but two Architectural Digest tours. Allen may not be the first celebrity to weather bad press, but starting in the MySpace era, she became one of the very first to narrate the experience with the ironic, first-person immediacy of social media. At her best, she could slash and burn through pretense, offering a far sharper and funnier take on industry and sexual politics than any freshly media-trained star of today.
While the internet applies its forensic techniques to autopsy this relationship, West End Girl has the harrowing feel of a victim-impact statement. Recorded in 16 days, its 14 tracks roughly correspond to an arc that spans from realization to emancipation. It is a mixture of public and private, fact and fiction that exists both to chum the waters and reveal behind-the-scenes context. Allen’s divorce was publicly announced in February; though some would have taken longer to reflect, her storytelling benefits from the particularity and immediacy. After struggling on previous records with uninspired beats and unwieldy targets, West End Girl is a return to form that gathers every ugly detail into a reminder of Allen’s force as a writer.
Despite unavoidable comparisons to Lemonade or 30, West End Girl is much leaner and more brutal. Unlike those records, Allen’s 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 what the songwriting lacks in conceptual development, it makes up for in raw emotion and narrative thrust. Allen’s truth bears out in a blow-by-blow account of coming to grips with a partner’s infidelity and gathering the resolve to leave for good. “Never get your sympathy/I don’t think you’re able,” she sings on “Let You W/In,” “But I can walk out with my dignity/If I lay my truth on the table.” There are plenty of pop songs about love as a drug, but I don’t think I’d ever heard one about heartbreak as a threat to sobriety until “Relapse.” Going through the motions of an unwanted open relationship would be painful enough, but throwing motherhood into the mix on “Nonmonogamummy” and “Dallas Major” is simply excruciating.
The record is a relief map of broken boundaries and abandoned commitments and Allen colors it in hellacious, knife-twisting detail. On “Pussy Palace,” she reveals that Bluebeard’s dungeon is actually a West Village bachelor pad stocked with sex toys, butt plugs, and lube. The perfectly paced reveal of “Madeline” (“But you’re not a stranger, Madeline”) is stomach-churning in its implication, even as it veers into cringe comedy with an unsettling Allison Williams impersonation. One of the truest West End moments occurs in “Sleepwalking,” when Allen tries desperately to re-kindle the spark with one of the funniest inversions of Oliver! put to record: “I know you’ve made me your Madonna/I wanna be your whore/Baby, it would be my honor/Please, sir, can I have some morе?” Occasionally she strains to sell the horror. “4chan Stan” has an edgy title but a faulty premise: No one who spent extended time there has ever been worth losing sleep over. That song also suggests Allen went to the Whitney Houston school of amateur sleuthing: “Never been in Bergdorf’s/But you took someone shopping there in May ’24.”
The turntablism on “Dallas Major” feels canned and anonymous, and the sunny soft rock of “Tennis” is too nondescript to hold any tension, but for the most part the production on West End Girl acquits itself pretty well. The emotional freefall of “Ruminating” feels like a cleaned-up Farrah Abraham cut, dislodging an avalanche of conflicting thoughts over unstable dance music. The medicated lullaby of “Sleepwalking” is perfectly suited to the bad daydream of fresh heartbreak. That song and “Just Enough,” about being slowly poisoned by a lover’s refusal to share the whole truth, just barely contain her aching vulnerability. They represent an evolution of Lily Allen’s signature style, so that the lightness isn’t a foil for her irony, but a vehicle for her hurt.
Nearly a hundred years ago, the writer Ursula Parrott covered shockingly similar terrain in her 1929 novel, Ex-Wife. Parrott’s Patricia is left slowly, then suddenly by her husband, with an open relationship sealing the end of their marriage. “He grew tired of me; hunted about for reasons to justify his weariness; and found them,” Patricia wryly laments. After describing all the ways she’d bent over backwards to keep her partner in her life, Allen finally realizes that she’s been left screaming in an empty room. “Wish I could fix all your shit, but all your shit’s yours to fix,” she sings with biting clarity on “Fruityloop.” Having recovered herself from the wreckage, West End Girl is a testament to how remarkable Allen is on her own.
