LILY ALLEN – WEST END GIRL: REVIEW
- Bernard Zuel
- 8 hours ago
- 4 min read
LILY ALLEN
West End Girl (BMG)
IF YOU’RE TEMPTED to sing some Pet Shop Boys when you see the name of Lily Allen’s new album don’t be embarrassed: you’re closer than you realise.
That’s true whether you’re singing their “Sometimes you're better off dead/There's a gun in your hand it's pointing at your head/You think you're mad, too unstable/Kicking in chairs and knocking down tables”, or if you’re more inclined to “You got a heart of glass or a heart of stone/Just you wait 'til I get you home/We've got no future/We've got no past”.
Back in 2025, mostly mid-tempo, sometimes venturing into dancehall or electro-pulsing territory, occasionally drifting along like a small glitter ball floating on a quiet river, and all from the pen and mind of Hammersmith-born, recently New York-domiciled Lily Rose Beatrice Allen (and collaborators such as writer/producers Blue May, Kito and Chloe Angelides), West End Girl is not necessarily a very good record. Certainly not consistently: there are some excellent moments, like the elegant drift of an otherwise quietly tragic Just Enough, but some of its melodies can be too wan, some of its rhythms can feel limp.
But it is a record that leaves you in no doubt that sometimes some people do wonder if they’re not better off dead, if they are not losing their mind, if it’s true the future remains dependent on the past how the hell can it exist at all, if there is some explanation for why they married that person, and what other retributions does the world hold?
Most of all, as befits an artist who has never shied away from full disclosure, whether it be of miscarriages and post-natal depression, the pleasures of drugs and sexual escapades, difficult parents, mental health challenges and the not-unrelated sheer bastardy of the music and media industries, the album – her fifth, and first since 2018, which was, you may care to note, before her now-ended marriage to American actor David Harbour – does not go quietly. At all.
Let me explain this in relative terms. As in relative to something else reviewed here recently, Amanda Shires’ open and sometimes brutal Nobody’s Girl, a report on life in the bruised, deflated, rebuilding, recovery, disgusted aftermath of divorce. West End Girl makes that record look like a love letter to an ex, like a subtle exposition of what went wrong.
Allen talks about ah open marriage (“We had an arrangement/Be discreet and don’t be blatant/There had to be payment/It had to be with strangers”) and a priapic partner unable to maintain even the few conditions set for it, and she does it occasionally with biting humour, or an almost dry retelling that feels like tallying scores rather than settling them (“Duane Reade bag with the handles tied/Sex toys, butt plugs, lube inside/Hundreds of Trojans, you're so fucking broken”). But mostly it is with open pain (“Why aren't we fucking baby?/Yeah, that's what you said/But you let me think it was me in my head/And nothing to do with them girls in your bed”).
She puzzles on the ego of a man who is troubled by any of her success (“I said, I got some good news/I got the lead in a play/That's when your demeanour started to change”), and unable to offer support when needed (“I feel embarrassed, I feel ashamed/You're so indifferent and that's insane/Where's all your empathy for, for all my pain?/My friends all tell me you are deranged”).
In Tennis, after seeing a text exchange on his phone, she questions why one of these lovers is a tennis partner – a level of intimacy beyond the acceptable transactional set ups – when he won’t play tennis with her, ending the track with “who’s Madeline?” repeated and repeated until she moves into the next song, Madeline. This it turns out is a conversation with said tennis player who assures Allen that “He is telling the truth/Our relationship has only ever been about sex”, but this isn’t really convincing. “I can't trust anything that comes out of your mouth/I'm not convinced that he didn’t' fuck you in our house”.
The rawness of the emotions and the simplicity of the language leave no room for interpretation or deflection. It’s all there before us: ugly and painful and savage and incredibly vulnerable. Remember when movies used to scream “you’ll feel like you’re right there”? Well on this record you can practically smell the lube, feel the breath, reel from the collision. All while singing along with a whistling tune.
It might well be cathartic and it’s certainly informative but is there a broader point to it? Is Allen or anyone helped by this? Probably not. But why should that matter? If this is revenge, she’s hardly the first; if this is a diary, likewise. And if this life as someone has experienced it, well, jeez, that’s never out of fashion.
Criticising her for any level of excoriating frankness would be odd when for a start this is exactly how she has always operated, from when it was amusing (dissing her dissolute brother) or descriptive (the aspirations of a crowd some of us had already aged out of) to explanatory (the mechanics of negotiating 21st century sex) and enlightening (stripping off the skin of music’s misogyny). And if it matters to you, she’s rarely spared herself.
So, sure, I’d have liked sharper tunes, you might have wanted funnier material, I suspect at least one American actor might have wanted a gag order, but if the Pet Shop Boys were here to ask “which do you choose, a hard or soft option?”, we can probably guess what the answer would be from this west end girl.
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