Divorce

Out of the many thousands — surely tens of thousands — of albums I’ve listened to in my time, I can’t recall one that had me on the edge of my seat from the first moments to the last on first listen the way Lily Allen’s new “West End Girl” did, almost as if it were a suspense movie. The tension doesn’t come in wondering about where the record’s narrative is ultimately headed; as you may have heard, this is a divorce record with a capital D. My inability to sit back in my chair came from just savoring every confessional line and wondering what the hell she was going to tell us in the next one to top it. It’s the pleasure of listening to a master storyteller who makes your jaw drop by seeming to have spilled all the tea almost at the outset, and then the tea just keeps on coming. Not since Boston in 1773, maybe, has anyone dumped it this massively, or this fulfillingly.

If that sounds a little hyperbolic, well, sure. But “West End Girl” is the kind of record that can inspire crazy superlatives. It’s not solely about the candor — although if all Allen did was read like-minded passages of her diary aloud, you’d still have to give the album some points. It’s not just what she says from moment to moment but how she says it that keeps you riveted. And that applies on fifth, sixth and seventh listen, too, however well you’ve absorbed the story beats. The level of pop craftsmanship remains superb throughout, too, in 14 songs that somehow manage to keep the emotions feeling utterly raw at every turn, even as the music itself is anything but.

So: Come for the shock value, and stay for the high level of craftsmanship. Then stay even longer for how cannily the album sustains its mix of droll delivery and pure heartbreak. It’s a place you’ll probably want to linger.

There have been a lot of powerful divorce albums in recent years: Already in 2025, we had Jason Isbell’s and Amanda Shires’ both-sides-now releases, plus Maren Morris’ roman-a-clef set. Going back further, we’ve had Adele’s “30,” Kacey Musgraves’ “Star Crossed” and the Chicks’ “Gaslighter,” and the divorce-court near-miss that was Beyonce’s “Lemonade,” not to mention non-marital laments like Taylor Swift’s “The Tortured Poets Department.” What all those albums had in common was how those artists offered at least occasional time-outs from the trauma. Usually the artist will feel obligated to give the audience a breather with at least a couple songs that deal with something other than the central rupture, or which flash forward to assure everyone that the singer is doing all right and healing up, thank you, post-split.

But there will be no such commercial breaks or reassurances about time’s healing power for Allen. These 14 songs never offer the slightest relief from the intense emotionality of the breakdown of her relationship. But they’re so uniformly good, the fact that she doesn’t stray for a second from the subject of straying and its effects, but holds onto it like a dog with a bone, is… well, it’s a relief, actually. Allen has been working as a stage actress lately, on London’s West End (hence the title), and listening to the album one fell swoop at a time is like immersing yourself in a terrific one-woman show, where she’s running through the demise of a dream marriage in something that feels like real time. If you’re not riveted by all of this, you may not even be rivet-able.

Released with only a few days’ warning, “West End Girl” has already prompted scores of headlines in the U.K., where Allen remains a paparazzi-attracting A-lister, and just a few less in the U.S., where she is revered by most of the pop intellgentsia but has been known to walk down the street unaccosted. It doesn’t hurt, as far as intense public curiosity goes, that she was just divorced from “Stranger Things” actor David Harbour, after five years of marriage that apparently started as a fairy-tale romance for her and ended in the devastation strewn throughout every track on the album. We say “apparently” because Allen did suggest in a British Vogue interview that there’s at least a little fiction mixed in with the blatant autobiography. But every lyrical detail is so vividly delineated — in a “she probably wouldn’t make this up” way — that, rightly or wrongly, you’re likely to walk away thinking that possibly the only thing fabricated from whole cloth is the pseudonym she came up with for the story’s principal mistress (“Madeline”).

The album gets off to a blithe enough start… for a couple of verses. The title track is styled initially as a kind of samba, with Allen breathlessly reeling off how she and her husband moved to a brownstone in New York: “Found ourselves a good mortgage / Billy Cotton got sorted.” (Cotton is the designer who made the couple’s new digs worthy of a much-talked-about home-tour profile in Architectural Digest in 2023.) All is bliss until Allen tells her husband in the tune that she had just landed a leading role in a London play, presumably referencing her award-nominated breakout role in “2:22 – A Ghost Story.” (She subsequently starred on the West End again this year, in “Hedda.”) “That’s when your demeanour started to change,” she sings. “You said I’d have to audition / I said, ‘You’re deranged’ / And I thought that that was quite strange.” And there, two minutes in, with 42 left to go, end the sum total of the album’s sunny moments. Halfway through this title track, the music suddenly changes, turning to a creepily underwater-sounding version of that electro-samba, as the backdrop to a phone call we hear only Allen’s side of, in which her partner delivers some unknown bad news from the other side of the pond. It’s up to the listener to imagine what’s being said on the other end of the line: Is he telling her he’s moving out for good? Or just moving to another state, or getting his own flat in town (all of which will factor in in songs that come later)? All she can think of to say back is a dumbstuck “It makes me really sad but… I’m fine, I just want you to be happy… I love you.” And with that, the dream is over. Even though the album is just getting started.

She saves the discovery of infidelity for track 2, “Ruminating” (and practically every track thereafter). This one is a delectable slice of hyperpop, paced to keep up with the racing thoughts that keep our heroine awake at 4 a.m.: “I’m not hateful but you make me hate her / She gets to sleep next to my medicator… / And I can’t shake the image of her naked / On top of you, and I’m disassociated.” She repeats a statement of her partner’s — “If it (casual sex) has to happen, baby, do you want to know?” —answering back, ad nauseum, “What a fucking line, line, line,” repeated endlessly in a lovely, profane, Autotune-enhanced vocal cascade.

“Sleepwalking” brings some sweetness back to the album, but only in the ironic music, which uses the cadences of a sweet girl-group ballad from the ‘50s or early ‘60s top underscore a bitter lyric that says: “Who said romance isn’t dead? / Been no romance since we wed / ‘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.” Allen says she’s become the madonna in her marriage when she’d eagerly play whore, if only. (Freud’s interpolation there goes uncredited.)

In “Tennis,” deceptively cheerful couplets that are divided up by light banging on a single piano key, she sings about how his abrupt grabbing back of his phone caused her to take a look at his texts, revealing that he’s been exchanging volleys on the court with a mystery woman, which in her mind may count as the more unforgivable infidelity: “If it was just sex, I wouldn’t be jealous / (But) you won’t play with me,” she sings — and then the music drops out for a blunt spoken-word inquiry: “And who’s Madeline?” (Soon to be drolly repeated and amended as: “Who the fuck is Madeline?”) In one of the great segues of our time, the next number is actually titled “Madeline,” and it’s there that Allen gathers the moxy to text the pseudonymous woman — and, for our listening pleasure, recites the answers that get texted back to her in an amusinglyu authentic American accent. (Whether she’s quoting real-life texts verbatim or paraphrasing for comedic effect is hard to know, but the end result is a dialogue that feels satirical and real at the same time.)

It’s so easy to become wrapped up in what’s actually being sung and said in “Madeline” that you might miss what’s happening musically, on first listen. The instrumental bed for this track focuses on a kind of acoustic guitar strumming that feels faintly redolent of a Marty Robbins ballad about Western gunslingers in a showdown — and yeah, that does become a bit more obvious when a couple of actual gunshot sound effects are eventually thrown into the mix.

It’s not the only time stylistic pastiche is employed for humor. It happens again, for instance, in “Dallas Major,” a song about Allen reentering the dating scene against her better judgment. That one brings in a light R&B groove that is meant to confer a surface sexiness, even as Allen warns a possible suitor, “I’m almost nearly 40 / I’m just shy of five-foot-two / I’m a mum to teenage children / Does that sound like fun to you?” Well, it does, kind of, but only because primary producer Blue May and his cohorts are adding bits of funk guitar, ‘70s-style keyboards and even some ‘80s-style scratching, while Allen conversely laments, over and over: “I hate it here.” If you don’t notice all these fairly subtle arrangement touchs on the first couple of listens, it’s understandable — you are busy being hit by a 2-by-4, which is to say, the accumulative effect of Allen’s jaw-dropper divulgements.

In “Madeline,” the “it’s complicated” part of the story really starts to take effect. There we learn the rules of the game of the marriage: It’s an open one, but Allen posits that she’s only agreeing to that to keep the embers of her former fairy-tale union alive. It’s here that she may lose some listeners who would otherwise be down to empathize with a straightforward divorce album: If you agreed to an open marriage, why are you so outraged he had sex with other women? The singer establishes there were boundaries set: “We had an arrangement / Be discreet, and don’t be blatant / There had to be payment / It had to be with strangers… [Dramatic pause.] But you’re not a stranger, Madeline.”

The magnitude of the extramarital exploits is stressed in an unforgettable sing-along that soon follows, “Pussy Palace.” In this one, the narrator goes to drop off medication at the West Village apartment her husband is keeping on his own, to discover a shoebox of love letters from serial lovers and a “Duane Reade bag with the handles tied / Sex toys, butt plugs, lube inside / Hundreds of Trojans, you’re so fucking broken / How’d I get caught up in your double life?” If that sounds stressful, know that the chorus is actually the kind of earworm you may spend the fall singing out loud — “I didn’t know it was your pussy palace (x4) / I always thought it was a dojo (x3) / So am I looking at a sex addict (x4)?” (It’s pretty much guaranteed, by the way, that with this album Merriam-Webster look-ups on dojo just went up 10,000%.)

The musical dynamics of the record are fairly spectacular. At its tenderest, there is “Just Enough,” a ballad with finger-picking guitar and orchestra that has Allen caught up in seeing herself as a hag: “Look at my reflection / I feel so drawn, so old / I booked myself a facelift / Wondering how long it might hold / I gave you all my power / How I’m seen through your eyes…” It’s one of the few songs on the album that is universal enough that many women will presumably relate — although, again, she can’t resist bringing it home to some triggering specifics when she asks aloud: “Why are we here talking about vasectomies?”

Contrast that with the wildly up-tempo tune that immediately precedes it, “Nonmonogamummy.” (Best tongue-twister of a title for a great pop song since “Femininomenon.”) In this one, Allen has reluctantly given in to keeping her side of the marriage open and is working the apps herself, in frustration. Her date for the evening is a British DJ named Specialist Moss, who raps, “I look at your eyes, you say your heart is broken,” while Allen can’t stop thinking about her husband: “I don’t want to fuck with anyone else / I know that’s all you want to do / I’m so committed that I’d lose myself / Because I don’t want to lose you.” The date goes badly, but the song goes spectacularly. An irresistible electric guitar line and an unbeatably furious beat help Allen and Blue May make “Nonmonogamummy” into what may be the most brilliant banger of the year.

Much respect, also, for “Relapse,” in which Allen, who is apparently about five years sober, writes about how the breakdown of her personal life and dreams is driving her to want to drink, or drug — but expresses this hunger not as some kind of slog but as a delicious piece of dubstep.

For an album that proceeds quite deliberately as a narrative, “West End Girl” doesn’t have a terribly definitive wrap-up. In the finale, “Fruityloop” (seemingly named for her ex’s choice of cereal, as well as the snare-drum loop that underlies the track), Allen brings the fatal attraction down to unresolved parental-neglect issues: “You’re just a little boy, looking for his mummy… / Playing with his toys, he just wants attention / He can’t really do attachment, scared he’s gonna be abandoned.” For herself, “I’m just a little girl, looking for a daddy / Thought that we could break the cycle.” If that sounds like pretty reasonable, even high-minded after all that has preceded it, rest assured that Allen is not quite done with the tough talk yet. “You’re a mess, I’m a bitch,” she proclaims. Magnanimous, sort of, but then she can’t help finally quoting the sage that was Lily Allen, circa 2008: “It’s not me, it’s you.”

If her deep woundedness comes as a bit of a surprise on this album, it may be because cockier older songs like “F— You” gave her the image of a tough broad, or because she already had one divorce album, 2017’s “No Shame,” in which she seemed to take a lot of responsibility for her first marriage’s failure. So among the many things that feel shocking here is just how submissive she seems to her mate’s will and wishes, up to a breaking point. The picture painted is of a wife who’s a true lovestruck romantic, and maybe even,  aspirationally, a tradwife. There’s an interesting contrast here, between the Allen who might be seen by some as a ball-buster for how candidly she’s laying out her anger for the world to see here, and the Lily who is — like a globetrotting woman before her — just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her. (Even for a while after she’s learned what minefields his phone and his Duane Reade bag are.) For all of the avenging spirit that animates a good part of this album, it’s tremendously touching, when she’s not turning up the pyro. Or even when she is.

For now, it’s enough that we have her back with an album-of-the-year contender. (Extra kudos to Blue May, who is not really a famous name among producers yet, but is probably about to become one, based on this.) But is this the beginning of a renaissance — a Lily-sance? — after she spent eight years off the recording scene? It’s not as if whole generations of women haven’t followed in the footsteps she set down more than 20 years ago, yet it still feels like we need her now more than ever.

Allen has said she was indeed recording prolifically in the lead-up to the domestic drama detailed here, but not releasing those tracks because she felt she was writing too impersonally, putting down her thoughts about the internet and stuff like that. You’d hate to think it would take this much trauma for her to follow up with another great album. (Here’s betting those unreleased songs about the worldwide web are not as bad as she thinks they are, right?) Anyway, we are just a world, standing in front of a girl, asking her to make more records.