Lily Allen’s West End Girl album is for the divorced moms.
The 40-year-old singer dropped the record, her fifth, with a week’s notice on October 24, promising a “mixture of fact and fiction.” But, in the days following its release, those dissecting Allen’s lyrics would probably agree that there is more fact than fiction.
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Allen separated from her husband since 2020, David Harbour, in late 2024. The breakup, and the lead up to it, is picked apart like an emotional autopsy throughout the album. “Nobody knew what was going on in my life,” Allen told The Times. “So I got into the studio, cried for two hours and then said, ‘Let’s make some music.’”
Across 10 days in late December, West End Girl was made — an 14-track postmortem of a marriage breaking down in private and in public, in front of children and the world.
Allen has never been one to self-censor. She has sparked controversy for saying his kids ruined her career and for not being able to remember how many abortions she’s had. So we didn’t expect anything less than West End Girl’s references to vasectomies, an open marriage, sex, and infidelity.
However, two decades into her career with all the same gumption that has been there since her 2006 breakthrough, we might not have expected to Allen to make being a twice-divorced mom of two sound so edgy and bold.
In “Dallas Major,” she sings about the awkward vulnerability of dating apps while she and Harbour were opening up their marriage. “My name is Dallas Major and I’m coming out to play. Looking for someone to have fun with while my husband works away. I’m almost nearly forty, I’m just shy of five-foot-two. I’m a mum to teenage children, does that sound like fun to you? ‘Cause I hate it here. I hate it here. I hate it here.” (Allen is a mom to 13-year-old Ethel and 12-year-old Marnie from her first marriage to Sam Cooper.)
In the album’s title track, Allen feels unsupported in her career, singing “I said ‘I got some good news, I got the lead in a play.’ That’s when your demeanor started to change.”
“Ruminating” hears Allen reckon with her partner’s desire to have sex with other people. “I told you all of this has been too brutal,” she sings. “You told me you felt the same, it’s mutual. And then you came out with this line, so crucial. Yeah, ‘If it has to happen, baby, do you want to know.’”
In “Madeline,” Allen talks directly to the woman her partner is sleeping with (a woman has since come forward claiming to be the real “Madeline” whom Harbour was seeing.) This is followed by the song’s breakout hit, “Pussy Palace,” a heartbreaking account of a crumbling marriage set to a catchy beat.
“Nothing’s ever gonna be the same anymore,” Allen sings. “I found a shoebox full of handwritten letters. From brokenhearted women wishing you could have been better. Sheets pulled off the bed, strewn all on the floor. Long black hair, probably from the night before. Duane Reade bag with the handles tied. Sex toys, butt plugs, lube inside. Hundreds of Trojans, you’re so fucking broken.”
With her frank, matter-of-fact lyrics, Allen has given tabloids plenty of fodder but, in a way that only a recently-divorced single mom could be, the singer is utterly unphased. As she told The Times, “I am a 40-year-old mother of two teenagers — it’s just not that big a deal.”
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