{"id":244917,"date":"2025-10-27T21:18:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-27T21:18:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/244917\/"},"modified":"2025-10-27T21:18:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-27T21:18:07","slug":"lily-allen-west-end-girl-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/244917\/","title":{"rendered":"Lily Allen ‘West End Girl’ Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tSince crash-landing into the indie blogosphere two decades ago, Lily Allen<\/a>\u2019s greatest strength has been her voice \u2014 an airy soprano that can communicate disdain with a sighed lyric or an audible eye-roll. It\u2019s helped her stand out even as she\u2019s shape-shifted through genres \u2014 and as she\u2019s dealt with press scrutiny, label woes, artist-on-artist tiffs, and strife in her personal life.<\/p>\n

\n\tStress on the homefront is the focal point of West End Girl, Allen\u2019s first record since 2018\u2019s Mercury Prize-nominated No Shame. It\u2019s also her first release since she married and got separated from Stranger Things star David Harbour \u2014 a perhaps-germane fact given that the record\u2019s whole narrative arc follows its main character\u2019s journey from wedded bliss to the opposite.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIt opens with the title track, a luxe sophistipop cut structured like a horror movie\u2019s opening sequence: Allen revels in the high-end domesticity on her horizon at the outset, then drives headlong into the muck of her partner\u2019s injured ego \u2014 he gaslights her about her acting talent, then drops a relationship bombshell that isn\u2019t audible but that\u2019s clearly crushed her. The strings swoon with increased fervor, matching her confusion and anxiety. \u201cRuminating,\u201d which follows, reveals the partner\u2019s request\u2014he wants to open up their marriage \u2014 warps Allen\u2019s voice over a tense two-step beat, turning her mind into a never-closing club where her anxieties about his extramarital activities are the star attraction.<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tAllen has always had a catholic approach to musical style, and that attitude serves the emotional spectrum of West End Girl well, with the stages of relationship grief and personal humiliation echoed by the music surrounding her. \u201c4chan Stan,\u201d a withering depiction of her partner\u2019s midlife crisis, is a fluffy synthpop cut that recalls the sort of music someone who\u2019s recently AARP age might have grown up on, and its gauziness makes its lyrical swipes (\u201cYou love all the power\/But you\u2019re not even cute\u201d) land even more sharply. She breaks the Wall of Sound splendor of \u201cTennis\u201d with \u201cAnd who\u2019s Madeline?,\u201d a question that becomes more fraught and central to the album\u2019s marriage-dissolution plot as the song goes on; by the end the query has become a \u201cda-da-da\u201d-studded refrain that refuses to get out of Allen\u2019s head. \u201cBeg For Me,\u201d where Allen recounts the grief she feels over falling out of her former partner\u2019s graces, puts her pathos front and center as a slowed-down version of Lumidee\u2019s \u201cNever Leave You (Uh Oooh, Uh Oooh)\u201d clatters behind her.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tAllen told The Times of London<\/a> that she wrote West End Girl in 10 days, the result of her forcing herself out of a depressive state and into the studio late last year. \u201cI thought I didn\u2019t have any good songs left,\u201d she told the British broadsheet. \u201cMy writing had been really bad and it took something to happen in my life, for everything to be blown up, for me to be able to go, \u2018Oh, here she is.\u2019\u201d Perhaps that\u2019s why West End Girl\u2019s last track, the plushly resigned \u201cFruityloop,\u201d hinges on one line \u2014 \u201cit\u2019s not me, it\u2019s you\u201d \u2014 that calls back to Allen\u2019s earlier years quite directly, what with it being the insouciant title of the 2009 album that solidified her pop-star status. Much of West End Girl finds Allen taking a brutal inventory of the scars she amassed while her marriage was falling apart; it couldn\u2019t have a happier ending than one where she\u2019s beginning to remind herself of who she could be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since crash-landing into the indie blogosphere two decades ago, Lily Allen\u2019s greatest strength has been her voice \u2014…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":244918,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134,144275],"class_list":{"0":"post-244917","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-celebrities","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-lily-allen"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244917"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244917\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/244918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}