In late October, two days after the British singer-songwriter Lily Allen unexpectedly released her confessional fifth album, “West End Girl,” about the breakdown of her marriage with the actor David Harbour, the couple’s Brooklyn brownstone went on the market for eight million dollars. Situated in Carroll Gardens, the house had, as Stefon from “Saturday Night Live” would say, everything: wall-to-wall white tiger-print carpeting, swan taps, a commode modelled after those in Versailles. In an Architectural Digest tour of the place, from 2023, the couple show off the sauna and cold plunge in the back yard. Harbour said that they wanted their floral, carpeted bathroom, which contained a fireplace and an armchair, to have “a Parisian kind of feeling, somewhere where you could feel like you’re reading Proust and smoking Gitanes in the bathtub, or something.” The dream!
Allen seems to sing about the house in the first track of “West End Girl,” which begins sweetly, with breathy, fairy-tale-like optimism, and ends with the couple renegotiating the terms of their union. “And now we’re all here, we’ve moved to New York / We’ve found a nice little rental near a sweet little school,” Allen sings. “Now I’m looking at houses with four or five floors / And you’ve found us a brownstone, said ‘You want it? It’s yours.’ ” She makes clear that this is something he wanted: “I could never afford this / You were pushing it forward / Made me feel a bit awkward.” All is well until Allen, or her narrator (the line is blurry), lands a part in a play on the West End and leaves for London. Once there, her husband calls and—though it is not explicitly stated in the song—seems to ask for an open marriage. The narrator reluctantly agrees. “No, I’m fine,” she says, “I want you to be happy.”
What follows is a breakup album for the ages, in which the spectacular, near operatic demise of the marriage is laid out like a spatchcocked chicken. All the gritty bits are there: messages with her husband’s mistress, the discovery of a cache of sex toys, a near relapse, and an anxiety spiral. In what is probably the album’s catchiest song, “Pussy Palace,” Allen sings about finding a Duane Reade bag filled with butt plugs and lube in an apartment she had believed, however inexplicably, was some kind of dojo. (“Hundreds of Trojans, you’re so fucking broken / How’d I get caught up in your double life?”) There’s a pop-y, faux-upbeat song about her failed attempts to date after the relationship begins to unravel, under the pseudonym Dallas Major. “My name is Dallas Major and I’m coming out to play / Looking for someone to have fun with while my husband walks away,” she sings, with brittle determination. “I’m almost nearly forty, I’m just shy of five-foot-two / I’m a mum to teen-age children, does that sound like fun to you? / Cause I hate it here / I hate it here.”
Well. What more could you ask for? Are we in the presence of high art? Probably not. Was I humming “Pussy Palace” as I picked up my toddler from day care? Absolutely. These are unrestrained, enjoyable songs that speak to a primal, if unflattering, craving for dirt. (Come down to the gutter! It’s fun down here!) Compared with “The Life of a Showgirl,” Taylor Swift’s anemic recent album, which fans pored over more or less fruitlessly for hints of her personal life, Allen has offered up a veritable buffet of revealing details. “We had an arrangement / Be discreet and don’t be blatant,” she sings, about the terms of her marriage. “There had to be payment / It had to be with strangers.” Swift gave us a scarf, but Allen has strung up all her dirty laundry.
How much of all this really happened? It’s hard to know for sure. Last month, in a discussion about the album, Allen told British Vogue, “There are things that are on the record that I experienced . . . but that’s not to say that it’s all gospel.” Allen and Harbour reportedly separated around December, 2024, and Allen wrote the songs during that time, she said, as “a way for me to process what was happening in my life.” There’s a track called “Tennis,” in which the narrator reads texts on her husband’s phone from someone named Madeline. “Who the fuck is Madeline?” she sings. Then, in the next song, “Madeline,” she reads what seem to be messages from Madeline to her. (Madeline signs off with the infuriating “Love and light, Madeline.”) Is Madeline real? Recently, Allen told the Sunday Times that Madeline was a “fictional character,” but acknowledged that she was a “construct” of real people.
