Lily Allen - West End Girl

Seven years after the release of No Shame in 2018

Story by Peter McGoran

27/11/2025

Confessional, culture-defining fifth album marks bold comeback for Lily Allen.

“Who’s Madeline…No, but who is Madeline, actually?” It took mere hours for Lily Allen’s confessional-pop odyssey, West End Girl, to become one of the most talked-about cultural moments of 2025. West End Girl - which offers a raw, unfiltered, and sometimes brutal appraisal of a marriage gone all fucked-up - pointedly deals with Allen’s real-life separation from her husband, David Harbour, due to Harbour’s alleged infidelity (the ‘other woman’ in the album is fictionalised as a person called ‘Madeline’, hence the quote at the top). West End Girl is the fifth album from Lily Allen, an artist who carved a niche for herself in the late 2000s by perfecting a London-centric brand of R&B-pop. For those who followed her music in the quieter decade that was the 2010s, they’d have noted how she constantly refined an absorbing songwriting style, using diary entry-esque lyrics to reflect the ups and downs and quiet chaos of her everyday life. In this sense, West End Girl is not so different from what we’ve already come to expect from the artist; it’s as visceral, lively, and rich in gossip as all the others she’s released. However, the unique circumstances (ie, the immediate demise of Allen’s marriage), meant that this album dropped like an atomic bomb following its release on October 24. The strength of West End Girl is that it feels completely off-the-cuff and in the moment. On the title track/album opener, you feel like you’re a voyeur in the room with Allen and Harbour, in the lead up to a major fight: “I said ‘I got some good news, I got the lead in a play’/That's when your demeanour started to change/You said that I'd have to audition, I said "You're deranged’.” From there, Allen takes us deeper and deeper into the widening cracks of her marriage. On ‘Ruminating’, a track which features a head-bopping 2-step garage beat and Allen’s voice autotuned in a warped way that seems to reflect her dissociation, the singer literally ruminates over her husband sleeping naked with someone else. Later, on the much-talked-about ‘Tennis’ and the earworm single ‘Pussy Palace’, she channels her spurned lover rage into cold, clinical lyrical bursts that don’t shy away from the details (eg. sex toys, lube, and hundreds of Trojan Horse condoms). Again, the strength of West End Girl is that it was written and recorded so quickly after the incidents it documents. Not only does the album feel raw, but it also feels dangerous in ways that few other modern albums do; you get a sense that Allen’s creative team might have tried to talk her out of a few of these songs because of how messy they are, but she stuck to her guns regardless. And we, the audience, get to sift through the gloriously messy finished product. Having said that, the messiness doesn’t always work. An obvious criticism is that the album’s 14 songs begin to sound kind of indistinguishable by the end. This is partly to do with how the lyrics aren’t as effective in the album’s second half, and also partly to do with how the sometimes unpolished production leaves things sounding a bit unfocused or half-finished. Whatever you feel about it, though, there is absolutely no denying the cultural influence of Lily Allen right now.