There’s never a right time in life to be a cheater, but tough luck to any man who has decided to do the dirt in late-stage 2025: Lily Allen is taking names. The British singer famed for 2000s hits including The Fear and Smile has re-entered the cultural conversation with a new album that unpicks with acid honesty the breakdown of her second marriage to Stranger Things actor David Harbour and casts a gimlet eye on why it is that women endure romantic betrayal.
With infidelity on Harbour’s part reported to have been a factor in the couple ending their four-year marriage, millennials and Gen X-ers haven’t been this united on social media around the importance of a cultural subject since Wagatha Christie became a courtroom drama.
“This album is a masterpiece,” declared Gwyneth Paltrow, who may not be revered for music criticism, but knows a thing or two about the sturm and drang of dealing with men in the public eye.
“For every woman who’s twisted herself into a human pretzel to keep some emotionally constipated bloke happy, this is our national anthem,” commented British comedian Jayde Adams.
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“I don’t think I could say it’s all true,” Allen has told the London Times of the album, recorded in 16 days in December. (It’s a line you suspect lawyers have advised her to say early and often.) “But yes, there are definitely things I experienced within my relationship that have ended up on this album.”
Ordinarily, when a famous musician writes about the breakdown of a relationship, it’s obliquely handled. You might get a reference to “Becky with the good hair” on a Beyoncé record. You might discern double meanings in a snarky Taylor Swift song title like The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived – a suspected swipe at Matty Healy of The 1975, an ex of Swift’s. But Allen – a virtuoso at public candour since her tears on MySpace days – hasn’t come for her ex with gnomic barbs. She has just set up a dartboard with Harbour’s face on it and started throwing kitchen knives straight at him. There’s a ringing authenticity to the emotions Allen unleashes on West End Girl: early suspicions, looming doubts, scabrous anger and crestfallen acceptance, delivered against sun-dappled pop rhythms and hook-laden choruses that serve to temporarily sheath the burrs that lodge beneath the skin.
Two songs in, Allen pinpoints the early darting fear of treachery when her husband is showing her a picture on his phone from Instagram: “It was how you grabbed your phone back right out of my hands.” And so it begins: the pendulum of doubt to lodge ice in the heart. Is Allen’s brave new life – emigrating from London with her two daughters to the US for her new man – a fool’s errand? Is her spouse, she sings, retreating to a “pussy palace” in the West Village with sex toys, condoms and a shoebox of handwritten love letters from heartbroken women? There’s gossipy shock value in the chiselled phrases, but it’s the emotional honesty from Allen that sears like a hot iron on skin.
The record is designed to make cheating men feel queasy and cheated-on women feel supported and understood. It’s a rare combination: bold and rather brilliant.
[ As dating apps lose their appeal, the race is on to create real-world experiencesOpens in new window ]
If some of the lyrical bluntness feels overly intimate – a detractor might argue she’s setting her house ablaze just for the warmth of the fire and the attention from the fire engine squad – what it says about the plight of women and dating is significant. Tinder was launched in 2012. Raya, the celebrity dating app where Allen met Harbour in 2019, began in 2014. The fading popularity of dating apps speaks to a simple reality: what looks like more choice in dating has wound up reading an awful lot like failure, as women and men struggle with feeling like they’re just one more picture to be flicked past: as insubstantial and commodified to suitors as an AI bot. One of the best lines on the album is Allen’s admission that she decided to lose herself – becoming invisible, denying her needs – to avoid losing her husband. She suggests she agreed to an open marriage policy – allowing for paid-for sex or sex with strangers – to hang on to their marriage.
It’s an odd feeling – to imagine that Allen could so fear being seen as old-fashioned or, at 40, as she sings, just plain old, that she might be willing to colour outside the lines of a traditional relationship to keep a spouse happy. But she’s not alone in seeming unsure about how the rules of dating work now. On the album, she reaches out to a lover of her husband’s called “Madeline” and the pair discuss the nature of the open relationship. Madeline texts to say that if rules have been broken, then “please let me know ‘cause I have my own feelings about dishonesty”.
What a mess. Until it isn’t. “I can walk out with my dignity, if I lay my truth on the table,” Allen sings. Her vulnerability on the record is an exercise in regaining power. She refuses to absorb the shame that should belong to her husband, painting him as an insecure, unattractive man who needs women for validation. “You’re not even cute,” she trills in her airy, featherlight soprano. Ouch. A divorce album, West End Girl is also a toolbox for how to live through pain.
Allen’s last record No Shame, released seven years ago, was Mercury nominated but didn’t do well commercially. Having been on release for just days, West End Girl is racking up millions of listens on Spotify. She’s hitting a nerve. It’s not out of the question that Allen could wind up in legal trouble with Harbour yet, but at least she’ll have the victory of delivering a pop masterclass along the way.
