There is one question in my mind as I listen to Lily Allen’s West End Girl for the first time: how many people – lawyers, friends, that tremulous voice of self-preservation at four in the morning – told her to reconsider releasing this divorce album? It’s not just confessional pop, it’s obliterative; an emotional post-mortem performed without anaesthesia, a death-by-a-million-cuts account of a thoroughly modern marriage breakdown. According to the album’s press release, it’s part fact, part fiction, and it’s impossible to know where one ends and the other begins. Naturally, listeners will focus entirely on the context – her already public, acrimonious divorce from actor David Harbour – and, given the album’s intense specificity, barely squint for the seams between truth and invention. Whatever happens next is inevitable: the blood feels real, and that’s the point.
Songs about cheating (“I can’t shake the image of her naked/ On top of you and I’m dissociated”), open relationships (“I don’t wanna f*** with anyone else/ Now that’s all you wanna do”) and sex addiction (“hundreds of Trojans, you’re so f***ing broken”) are best experienced raw, on their own terms. Inevitable comparisons to classic heartbreak pop albums written by thirtysomethings will seem wrong. Beyoncé’s Lemonade, after all, is mediated by marital reconciliation; Kacey Musgraves’s Star-Crossed made measured by the lack of betrayal; Adele’s 30 tempered by a few years of reflection. But the bewildered and wounded Allen wrote West End Girl in 10 days. It shows, in the best way.
