West End Girl

Seven years have passed since Lily Allen bagged herself a Mercury Music Prize nomination for <i>No Shame</i>, a peppy yet vulnerable record that chronicled the singer-songwriter’s attempts to pick up the pieces following the breakdown of her first marriage. Her fifth studio album, <i>West End Girl</i>, adheres to a similar formula—eviscerating themes concealed within bright pop melodies—pulling the listener into a tightly contained soap opera that arrives in the wake of her second marriage (to <i>Stranger Things</i> star David Harbour) ending. Announcing the record, she said it was an attempt to document “the events that led me to where I am in my life now” while also describing it as a “mixture of fact and fiction.”

Setting the scene with the title track—a dreamy, orchestral number that depicts a couple moving into a new home but hitting a bump when one of them lands a role in a play—the album narrates a bait-and-switch story in which the boundaries of a relationship (and Allen’s narrator along with them) warp and mutate. “Ruminating” is a drum ’n’ bass spiral into her racing thoughts after an admission of infidelity, while “Relapse” finds her struggling to maintain her sobriety in the wake of ever more painful revelations, her vocals chopped and echoing. Later, “Beg For Me” taps into heartbreak over a pitch-shifted sample of Lumidee’s “Never Leave You (Uh Oooh, Uh Oooh),” before resigning herself to the stark reality of her situation on “Let You W/In,” a soft, folky production.

There are, it must be said, very few moments of levity to be found throughout <i>West End Girl</i>, but tracks like “Nonmonogamummy” and “Dallas Major,” which portray reluctant participation in a newly opened relationship, are patterned from the same sardonic cloth as the more biting cuts from her early catalog—albeit dampened by the weary sadness that permeates the album at large. <i>West End Girl</i> closes the window on the drama at the same time as Allen closes the door on her marriage, leaving the listener to mull over events with no return for a triumphant encore—but her razor-edge lyricism and stunning attention to production detail provide ample reasons to wind back to the start and press play all over again.