Sex, secrets and celebrity: Lily Allen bares all on her wild divorce album

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By Tom W. Clarke

October 24, 2025 — 5.37pm

Lily Allen, West End Girl

It’s been 16 years since the peak of the Lily Allen experience. Her 2009 breakout album, It’s Not Me, It’s You, was cheeky, risqué, in your face. Hits like Not Fair, The Fear and F--- You established her as a fun and provocative new age pop star, her catchy tunes buoyed by unapologetic sexuality and a killer sense of humour, like a British, brunette Sabrina Carpenter of the late-2000s.

The Lily Allen of 2025 is a very different proposition. She’s publicly weathered a series of storms over the past decade and a half, living out relationships, breakups, controversies, motherhood, and mental health crises under an unrelenting spotlight.

The British pop star’s first album in seven years dives into the, ahem, complexities of non-monogamy.

West End Girl is Lily Allen’s first album in seven years, and it’s the most vulnerable and reflective her music has ever been. Written over a 10-day period in the same month she announced the end of her relationship with actor David Harbour, it’s an intensely personal and raw album. Channelling her hurt with surprising directness and painful detail, it’s a slightly chaotic meditation on sex, love, heartbreak and infidelity in the bright lights of New York celebrity.

The title track is a twinkling, theatrical introduction to the story that feels like the big opening number to a musical (perhaps intentional, given its references to Allen’s role in the 2021 play 2:22 A Ghost Story). It sets the scene for a relationship teetering on the brink, marital bliss eroding into distrust and fighting.

Allen released West End Girl with no singles and little fanfare for maximum impact.

There were no singles released prior to the record’s launch, but second track Ruminating is the closest the album comes to the kind of banger that might attract heavy radio play, its nu-disco reminiscent of Dua Lipa with a distinctly darker edge.

West End Girl is many things – a no-punches-pulled account of family breakdown, a rambling journal spilling out secrets and pain, bops galore – but one thing it certainly is not is an advertisement for non-monogamy.

Tennis and Madeline, seemingly one song split in two, introduce us to Allen’s experience with non-monogamy: the valiant attempts at rule-setting and the unavoidable grey, the complexities and messiness, the jealousies and betrayals. Over the jaunty keys of Tennis and flamenco guitars of Madeline, Allen angrily rebukes a situation she felt crossed the line into cheating. The spoken refrain across the two songs of “Who’s Madeline?” feels like Allen’s version of Beyonce’s “Becky with the good hair”.

And on the reggae-infused, bongo-backed banger Nonmonogamummy (featuring Specialist Moss with a super fun contribution), Allen washes her hands of ever having been interested in the whole idea in the first place.

Allen and ex David Harbour in happier times, at the Met Gala in May 2022.

Underneath the anger and hurt, this is ultimately an album about loneliness. The stories Allen tells are not always relatable, but in mining the hollowness of feeling alone, she finds depth and emotion that resonates. Dallas Major is a particular highlight, a brilliant rumination on the dissatisfaction, rejection and isolation that comes from entering the dating scene unwillingly and getting lost in the dating app churn.

Unquestionably a story told entirely from one side, there is little self-reflection or consideration of what Allen’s role might have been in the breakdown of the relationship. However, there’s also no doubt that this is Allen’s truth, undeniably subjective but generous in its openness and brutal in its honesty. Let You W/In is an unapologetic acceptance of that, laced as it is with a bubbling self-righteousness and wounded sadness.

West End Girl is a new side of Lily Allen. The accent remains distinctive, the vocals remain breathy and captivating, the punches still land. But in reaching new heights as a storyteller, and exploring the depths of her emotions in the wake of an incredibly difficult time, she stretches herself as an artist and songwriter in a way that is as beautiful as it is heartbreaking.

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