Perhaps the only thing more shocking than listening to West End Girl today, is the thought of David Harbour listening to West End Girl today. With Lily Allen’s first album in seven years, a caustic and cathartic retelling of the breakdown of her marriage to the Stranger Things actor, the musician has etched a massive F*ck You into the pop landscape.
It is a truly, devastatingly good revenge album. Allen rages. Harbour is painted as malicious and manipulative. While Allen has said not every detail is the gospel truth, the album depicts her somewhat reluctantly agreeing to an open relationship (‘it makes me sad.. I’m fine, I want you to be happy’), and then being cheated on over the course of three years. In ‘Pussy Palace’, she wonders, ‘How’d I get caught up in your double life?’ after finding a bag of sex toys, condoms and letters from other women. Given that the musician has been sober since 2019, ‘Relapse’ is a staggering listen. ‘I need a drink, I need a valium / You pushed me this far and I just need to be numb,’ she sings, auto-tuned vocals taking nothing away from the stark brutality of it all.
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Lily Allen has always had a knack for unfiltered honesty. She’s been embroiled in countless controversies, including numerous Twitter feuds and even a spat with PETA, but at its best, her frankness makes for refreshing, and really quite validating, pop music. Her debut single, 2006’s ‘Smile’ was about finding joy in the demise of an ex. ‘Fuck you, fuck you very very much,’ was an actual lyric eight years later. In the height of her fame in the mid 2000s, it was rare and strangely radical to see a woman in pop music dare to be a bit unpalatable. Love or loathe her, there is something very real about the way Allen moves through the world.
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Any album detailing the breakdown of an A-list celebrity relationship is going to be a viral success, but there is a reason revenge albums garner such broad appeal. Beyond the salaciousness, there is something deeply profound about the experience of listening to the rawest, messiest moments of someone else’s life. In times of extreme suffering, it can feel almost impossible being a human in the world, and from the rage of ‘4chan Stan’, jarring against its glittering melody, to the crushing vulnerability of ‘Just Enough’, West End Girl encompasses the gnarly gamut of human experience at its hardest. Reportedly written in just 10 days, it’s a real-time account of Allen trying to process a level of betrayal beyond her current comprehension. West End Girl isn’t platitudes about self-love and healing, it’s a ball to the wall I’m-not-sure-if-I-will-survive-this kind of break-up.
The allure of the revenge album lies in its melodrama. Divorces are widely considered one of the most stressful life events a person can go through – especially when infidelity and children are involved – and West End Girl captures the depths of feeling. Most people will experience some form of break-up throughout their life, and revenge albums show how loss can be a great leveller. SZA has headlined Glastonbury and won five Grammy awards, but with ‘Kill Bill’, she proved that celebrities actually are just like us, at least in their capacity for the kind of thoughts and gallows humour that often plague people in the throes of heartbreak; ‘I might kill my ex, I still love him though. Rather be in jail than alone.’
For a long time, the revenge album was overwhelmingly the domain of men. Marvin Gaye’s seminal Here, My Dear followed the acrimonious divorce from his first wife, Anna Gordy Gaye. Justified – bitter jabs masked in pop bangers – served as Justin Timberlake’s autopsy of his split with Britney. But for women – at least outside of hip-hop – the pressure to be palatable has long infiltrated mainstream music and culture at large. Allen’s ‘Madeline’ is already garnering comparisons to Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’. But where Parton had to beg the other woman to stand down, Allen, ‘knows none of this is your fault’.
Women have a lot to be angry about right now, and West End Girl arrives at the height of a new era of revenge albums, one that can be traced back to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and Amy Winehouse’s Back To Black. These records are unapologetic in their delivery of rage and pain, and provided a precursor to Beyonce’s revolutionary revenge album, Lemonade. After silently facing years of rumours about her husband Jay-Z’s infidelity, she broke her silence in the most spectacular way imaginable. Lemonade set a new ground zero for revenge albums that refuse to shy away from the gritty realities of the relationships they blast. It’s the courage of these women that has paved the way for a new generation of artists like Olivia Rodrigo, Charli XCX and Lola Young to express their own multifacetedness, to show the world their horniness one minute and their rage the next.
Ultimately time does heal and Allen, a strong and self-possessed woman, will probably be fine. Rage subsides, nothing lasts forever, but courageous revenge albums tend to have an enduring legacy. Records like West End Girl capture an artist at their lowest and become a soundtrack for the broken-hearted. But they also represent the moment pain turns into a kind of power, and in that, there is endless hope.
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