Lily Allen Announces New Album West End Girl Out Friday

A new Lily Allen album is dropping this Friday. It’s called West End Girl, and it’s her first since 2018’s No Shame.

Three days ago, in a British Vogue profile, Allen revealed she had completed a new album amidst a breakup with her husband, actor David Harbour. A press release indicates she wrote and recorded the new songs “over an intense 10-day period in Los Angeles” last December and later finished them in London and New York. She wrote them “mainly in collaboration with her musical director Blue May.” Allen, May, Seb Chew, and Kito are credited as executive producers.

British Vogue journalist Olivia Marks described the album like so: “It is, quite possibly, Lily at the very peak of her powers: the gut-punch lyrics, now with added years on the clock, are set to infectious pop, and her pitch-perfect voice is at its most beautifully fragile. Frankly, it will eviscerate you.” The story included lyrics that seemed to allude to Harbour’s alleged cheating: “You let me think it was me in my head/ And nothing to do with them girls in your bed.” Allen did offer a qualifier: “There are things that are on the record that I experienced within my marriage, but that’s not to say that it’s all gospel. It is inspired by what went on in the relationship.” With that in mind, I’m very curious to hear new Lily Allen songs with titles like “Pussy Palace,” “4chan Stan,” and “Nonmonogamummy.”

Allen shared this statement in a press release:

I’m nervous. The record is vulnerable in a way that my music perhaps hasn’t been before – certainly not over the course of a whole album. I’ve tried to document my life in a new city and the events that led me to where I am in my life now. At the same time, I’ve used shared experiences as the basis for songs which try to delve into why we humans behave as we do, so the record is a mixture of fact and fiction which I hope serves as a reminder of how stoic yet also how frail we humans can be. In that respect I think it’s very much an album about the complexities of relationships and how we all navigate them. It’s a story…….

TRACKLIST:
01 “West End Girl”
02 “Ruminating”
03 “Sleepwalking”
04 “Tennis”
05 “Madeline”
06 “Relapse”
07 “Pussy Palace”
08 “4chan Stan”
09 “Nonmonogamummy”
10 “Just Enough”
11 “Dallas Major”
12 “Beg For Me”
13 “Let You W/in”
14 “Fruityloop”

West End Girl is out 10/24 on BMG. My inclination is to hope she isn’t sampling Pet Shop Boys on the title track, but I suppose there’s a chance it could be cool.