“You know, I used to be quite famous / that was way back in the day,” sings Lily Allen on “Dallas Major,” the eleventh track on her new album “West End Girl.” And, indeed, for those of us who grew up listening to Allen’s early-aughts pop music we might have been forgiven for thinking she’d dropped into obscurity.
I first discovered Allen’s 2006 debut album “Alright, Still” in my early teens, a decade after its release, and it quickly became one of my favorite albums of all time.
“Alright, Still” — confessional, mockney-accented, bolstered by equal parts Myspace hustling and nepo dad — seemed to cement Allen as a capital-S star, and her sophomore album “It’s Not Me, It’s You” only built on that momentum. (You probably recall the acerbic “Fuck You,” in which she makes clear in no uncertain terms exactly how she feels about former U.S. president George W. Bush and his right-wing policies.)
I wasn’t alone, though, in feeling pretty disappointed with the next couple Allen albums, 2014’s “Sheezus” and 2018’s “No Shame.” Neither album strayed very much from her earlier work, thematically or sonically, but they were missing something.
I am delighted to say that “West End Girl” is a return to form in the best way. Though, like much of Allen’s work, it borrows from a range of diverse genres, “West End Girl” is unapologetically a pop album, and it does what I think the genre is supposed to do at its best: it transforms the pain in Allen’s personal life into catchy hooks and danceable choruses.
The album’s opening track, the titular “West End Girl,” borrows heavily from musical theatre, and, indeed, you could almost picture every song on the album making up the soundtrack of a show playing London’s West End theatre district. Each song holds its own individually, but the album is meant to be taken as a cohesive narrative, listened to in order, about the breakdown of Allen’s marriage to actor David Harbour following the couple’s exploration of nonmonogamy.
The title track ends with a one-sided recreation of a phone call between Allen and Harbour after Allen accepted the role in a play in London. They began a period of long distance in their marriage, during which Harbour asked Allen to open up the marriage. Allen halfheartedly agreed, despite it making her uncomfortable, because she thought she had to to salvage the relationship.
The slow-creeping betrayal and humiliation Allen experienced are all too relatable to the listener, especially the female listener, even if they’re contextualized by the trappings of wealth and fame.
Nonmonogamy, to be sure, is not the problem. Allen makes it clear through her lyrics that her relationship lacked healthy boundaries and consent. Each track on the album takes a different tack to tell listeners precisely how. The scathing lead single “Pussy Palace” asks, “How’d I get caught up in your double life?” and two tracks, “Tennis” and “Madeline,” are each about a particular affair that transgressed the emotional boundaries of their arrangement and dealt a blow of betrayal. In “Madeline,” Allen sings over frantic Spanish guitar, “I wouldn’t trust anything that comes out of his mouth,” and that line seems to express most clearly the album’s nexus, the fracture that splintered their marriage beyond repair.
The dancehall-inflected “Nonmonogamummy” is a callback to some of Allen’s best work, which takes inspiration from the music of the Caribbean diaspora in her home city of London.
There are certainly conversations to be had here, as in much of Allen’s work, about appropriation versus appreciation, but she is careful to be respectful about these cultural influences. She consistently works directly with Caribbean-British artists, in this case, St. Lucia-born, West London-based producer and DJ Specialist Moss. Even as an upper-class white British woman, she came up in the London music scene alongside these influences, so they feel very organic, not put-on.
“Nonmonogamummy” sounds like Caribbean-British music, which is to say it sounds like London, and it’s hard not to see this song as anything but something of a triumphant homecoming after the time Allen spent isolated from her support network. As she frets in “Relapse,” The ground is gone beneath me, you pulled the safety net / I moved across an ocean from my family and friends / the foundation is shattered, you’ve made such a fucking mess.”
The album’s release in October was met with plenty of Internet buzz, especially as listeners dug up a house tour video the former couple made for Architectural Digest three years ago that now comes across as rather wince-inducing. Allen further leaned into the public’s newfound fascination with her personal life by dressing as the children’s book character Madeline for Halloween. (Get it?) And now, tickets to her West End Girl Tour, which comes to the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago on April 3rd and 4th, are selling fast. In keeping with the album’s musical theatre influences, West End Girl Live is split into two acts; the first half of the show reimagines Allen’s older hits with a string ensemble, and Allen herself does not come onstage to perform until the second act. Some fans have been disappointed in the performance’s short runtime – Allen is onstage for only about 45 minutes – but she does, in fact, perform the entire album’s tracklist, complete with props, sets, and narrative choreography, making the show a fitting homage to the genre that inspires it.
