Lily Allen is finally opening up about why it took seven years for her to release her fifth studio album, West End Girl. The British singer made a big return in October with the project, which is heavily inspired by her split from her estranged husband, actor David Harbour. Fans had wondered why she stayed away from releasing new music for so long, and now she is explaining the reason with striking honesty.
West End Girl arrives seven years after her last album, No Shame, which came out in 2015. Lily said she held back from releasing anything new because she did not believe the songs she was writing were good enough. Speaking to Interview Magazine, she admitted, “Well, everything I was writing was dog s**t.” She said she felt like she had writer’s block at the time, but looking back she thinks it was something much deeper. “I felt like I had writer’s block or something, but actually I think I just knew that something wasn’t right.”
Lily, who is now 40, said she always tries to be truthful in her music. She believes she avoided going deeper in her writing because she sensed her personal life was breaking apart underneath her. “I always strive to tell the truth in my art, so I guess I subconsciously knew that something wasn’t right in my personal life, and I couldn’t go there creatively because if I did, then it would all fall apart.”
She said she wrote “probably” a hundred songs over the past four or five years but was never excited about them. That changed completely once her marriage began to unravel. She said she “immediately” found her “authentic voice” when things were “all falling apart.”
She explained that she was not ashamed of the earlier songs but never felt they were worth sharing. “I wouldn’t say I was ashamed but I was not excited by anything I had done to the point where I wanted to share it with people that I love, never mind the rest of the world,” she said. “Whereas when I started writing this, I was immediately like, ‘I’m onto something.’”
Lily started dating the Stranger Things actor in 2019, and they married in a Las Vegas chapel the following year. Reports in December 2024 claimed they had separated after allegations of infidelity involving David. West End Girl appears to confirm those claims, with lyrics that also suggest the pair may have been in an open relationship.
