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Last Friday, Lily Allen released her first album in seven years, titled West End Girl. It’s all about her tumultuous four-year marriage to David Harbour. I listened to it over the weekend and the tl;dr is that David asked Lily for an open relationship and she agreed to it on the terms that it would only be sex with no feelings involved. She was fine with their arrangement until she found text messages on his phone indicating that he’d developed actual feelings for another woman, “Madeline.” After kicking him out, she brought his things from their shared townhome in Brooklyn to an apartment they had in Manhattan where she found a lot of incriminating evidence about his “double life.”

Lily sat down with Interview’s Mel Ottenberg for a lengthy profile to promote West End Girl. They talked a lot about the album and her mindset when she was making it, which was mainly to process her feelings as everything was going down. Lily and David didn’t announce their divorce until early February 2025, but Lily wrote the entire album in just over a week’s time in December 2024. Now, almost a year later, she claims that she’s healing and even though she was in a lot of pain when she wrote it, she was very mindful in post-production about not sounding like a victim.

OTTENBERG: So should we call it a revenge tour?

ALLEN: [Laughs] It isn’t. I mean, I wrote this record in 10 days in December and I feel very differently about the whole situation now. We all go through breakups and it’s always fucking brutal. But I don’t think it’s that often that you feel inclined to write about it while you’re in it.

OTTENBERG: You do that later.

ALLEN: Yeah. That’s what’s fun about this record; it’s viscerally like going through the motions. At the time, I was really trying to process things and that’s great in terms of the album, but I don’t feel confused or angry now. I don’t need revenge.

OTTENBERG: You’re just telling a story.

ALLEN: Well, some of it is based on truth and some of it is fantasy.

OTTENBERG: Wait, I want to tell you that “Sleepwalking” is one of my favorite songs on the album. I think of being hurt and alone and really spiraling in your feelings, but I also remember being an asshole.

ALLEN: I played the bad character in my first marriage, so I understand.

OTTENBERG: Do different types of people have different reactions? Like straight men, straight women, lesbians, gays?

ALLEN: I haven’t played it to that many straight men, but my manager has. He says you can definitely tell who’s cheating on their wife and who isn’t.

OTTENBERG: How do you feel now? I mean it’s heartbreaking, sure. But it’s also fun. You really have to have a sense of humor to make this album, which you do.

ALLEN: I don’t know if I did at the time, but we did go back and tweak things. It was very important to me that I didn’t sound like a victim, so I’d be like, “We have to change that line. It just sounds too, ‘Poor me.’” I wanted it to feel brutal and tragic, but also empowering, that there was joy in being able to express it.

OTTENBERG: Music with a broken heart has a different power.

ALLEN: Yeah, especially in this day and age when we are so disconnected because of our smartphones. It’s like, “Holy shit, I’m feeling things.” I’m always wanting to feel things, which is why I’m a drug addict and an alcoholic. I’m desperately searching for that thing.

[From Interview]

When I read that Lily wrote the album back in December, I wondered if her picking this particular release date was due to production schedule or Stranger Things’s fifth season release. I think it was a bit of both and the timing just happened to work out. She wanted to get a version of her side of the story out there while also acknowledging that she’d engaged in a permission stricture that led to her marriage ending. I totally get writing from an emotionally raw place and just wanting to get it all out there. Lily describes the album as “autofiction,” but the lyrics are so specific that to me, autofiction is a legal term for “I changed some names, fantasized a conversation with my ex’s mistress, and details like claiming I found hundreds of condoms in his love nest when I really only found dozens.” We’ll never really know what’s fact and what’s fiction, but all eyes are on David as he prepares to do press for the final season of Stranger Things and so far, he hasn’t said a peep.

As to Lily’s observation about being an addict that always wants to feel things, one of the more underrated songs on West End Girl is called “Relapse.” It’s all about how much she’d like a drink or a Valium in order to stop feeling the pain that the marriage/breakup is causing her, but she knows that she can’t give in or else she’ll lose it all. It’s a pretty powerful, deeply honest song.

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