reviews / 2025

LILY ALLEN - West End Girl

Name: LILY ALLEN – West End Girl
Item: West End Girl
Rating: 7
Author: Stefano Fiori

2025 (Bmg)

alternative pop

by Stefano Fiori

Lily Allen hadn't put out an album in over seven years, her career as a popstars seemed to have come to a definitive halt in favour of her long-cherished role as a mother and her, seemingly, fulfilling relationship with American actor David Harbour, for whom she had even left her beloved London. "I make more money selling photos of my feet on Onlyfans than making music," she irreverently declared a year ago, making her comeback all the more unexpected. And yet, almost out of nowhere, here she is back on the scene in guises no less provocative, with a record that is, in its own way, transgressive.

"West End Girl" is in fact a genuine concept album about the end of her relationship with Harbour, one that, by all accounts, was anything but idyllic. Every song on the tracklist serves as a page from an intimate diary in which Allen, as always with no filter, lays bare her pain, her confessions and the lurid details regarding: infidelities, broken open-relationship agreements, discoveries of sex toys, arguments over a possible vasectomy, conversations with his lovers seeking reassurance more than revenge, a return to England. Described point-blank as a sex-addicted, her ex-partner has even chosen to delete himself from social media in a futile attempt to avoid too much media noise.

Be careful, though, not to lump this album in, despite its admittedly less-than-elegant premise, with the same old batch of revenge songs di Shakira and by Miley Cyrus from a couple of years ago, in which the end of their relationship was used as a pretext to churn out trite, rather banal slogans, trotted out online to the beat of meme. We're not even in the territory of the Taylor Swift who seemed to collect little stories more with the aim of later writing scornful songs about them than to actually enjoy them. Within the grooves of “West End Girl”, Allen in fact comes across as a disoriented woman, wrecked by doubt, seeking dialogue, who owns up to her faults, who went along with her man just to avoid losing him, at times open to forgiveness; not exactly a feminist heroine, in other words. All the details mentioned above thus take on more the shape of a stream of consciousness, of a deeply private and even compelling self-analysis, than of mere mudslinging.

And in all this “gossipy” context, where does the music end up? Fortunately, it occupies a top-tier level, because Allen seems to have miraculously rediscovered the class and maturity of her finest work, that “It’s Not Me, It’s You” not by chance literally quoted in the final and all-in-all conciliatory “Fruityloop”. Granted, her masterpiece sounded more rigorous thanks to a minimal, liquid electronic sound, reminiscent of the pairing of Orbit/Madonna, which acted as a fil rouge between the various melodic ideas, and which this time around is instead almost absent (with the exception of the sinuous “Pussy Palace”).

Nevertheless, the delicacy with which Lily Allen tackles much of this new and varied repertoire is more than enough to let the subtle drum'n'bass of "Ruminating" and "Relapse" sit alongside the acoustic tenderness of "Just Enough" and "Let You W/In", the pop playfulness of "4chan Stan" and "Tennis" alongside a "Madeline" with a whiff of Urge Overkill, and the one track that revisits the dancehall sounds of her previous album, the still enjoyable "Nonmonogamummy".

One feels for Allen's once again broken heart, and Harbour will forgive us (he'll surely find a way to wriggle out of this media impasse with the new season of “Stranger Things”) if we find ourselves thanking this painful tale of infidelity for finally giving us back an artist at the top of her game.

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03/11/2025

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Stefano Fiori, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition