Lily Allen and David Harbour confirmed that they were getting divorced in early February after four years of marriage. Most of what’s come out in the press has been from Lily’s side, and it’s felt acrimonious. Lily was also pretty emotional while talking about their break up on her “Miss Me?” podcast. It felt like it was be messy, especially when we learned about David’s new girlfriend a few weeks later.

Lily and David’s breakup was even messier than we could have imagined, and Lily may have gotten the last laugh. On Friday, she dropped her first new album in seven years and it’s a doozy. In terms of truth bombs, think of it as Fiona Apple’s When the Pawn… meeting with The Chicks’ Gaslighter and Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department. She reveals so much about their tumultuous relationship, including that while it was open, David still cheated on her while gaslighting her. Lily did a recent interview with The Times, where she spoke about the meaning of her lyrics.

I ask about some specifics in the album. In the song Tennis Allen describes spotting a message ping on her husband’s phone from another woman, called Madeline. Who is she? “A fictional character.” Is she a construct of others? “Yes.” Another song’s lyrics, which raise plenty of questions go: “We had an arrangement/ Be discreet and don’t be blatant/ It had to be with strangers.” Which suggests to me an unconventional marriage that allows flings, so long as they are within certain parameters.

“I just feel we are living in really interesting times — in terms of how we define intimacy and monogamy, people being disposable or not,” Allen says. “The way we are being intimate with each other is changing as humans … Lots of young women are not finding the idea of marriage or even a long-term relationship that attractive any more.”

But is that such a bad thing? At least there will be far fewer people stuck in loveless relationships. “Oh, I don’t know [that] it’s necessarily bad,” says Allen, whose own parents, the actor Keith Allen and the producer Alison Owen, divorced when she was four. “Lots of people from my parents’ generation stayed together for ever and were miserable. You didn’t have endless choice so you may have worked at something harder. But now you don’t have to…”

Early on in West End Girl she says she wants to “lay my truth on the table”. So, with lyrics about subjects ranging from cheating to vasectomies, is it all true? “I don’t think I could say it’s all true — I have artistic licence,” Allen says, cautiously. “But yes, there are definitely things I experienced within my relationship that have ended up on this album.”

Has Harbour heard it? “I don’t know if I can answer that,” she says, quietly. What about her children? “I don’t know if I can answer that,” she says, laughing. That proves to be the very last subject, whether for reasons legal or personal, that is off the table.

The record starts off happily. “Yes, for about 44 seconds,” Allen says, laughing. It paints the initially optimistic picture of a woman who moves to New York with her two kids to live with her wonderful new husband in a lush brownstone in Brooklyn. She is offered a play in London, but the husband’s not keen. He gaslights her and is unsupportive. By the time the first song — also called West End Girl — finishes, there are tearful phone calls. Soon the sex stops, and by song four, Tennis, he seems to be having an affair. “Who the f*** is Madeline?” his wife asks. By the seventh song, the Jilly Cooperesque Pussy Palace, their marriage is detritus as the wife finds a plastic bag, “with the handles tied, sex toys, butt plugs, lube inside” at the husband’s secret apartment. Other songs — Relapse, Nonmonogamummy, Beg for Me — continue the extraordinary, explicit narrative.

A lot of the lyrics are dark. “That’s an understatement. I’ve had a tough year, for sure.” Yet by blending those words with her innate knack for big choruses, plus her love for early-2000s UK garage, nothing sounds depressing. “I hide in music,” she says. “It is the musical version of what I do in my life.”

[From The Times]

I listened to the entire album on Saturday and if even half of what Lily alleges is true… then, yikes. Her side of the story is that David pressured her into an open relationship and she complied because she loved him and wanted to keep him happy. The terms were that his dilliances would basically be one-night stands with no feelings involved. Lily’s issues started when he fell for this “Madeline” chick.

I went down the rabbithole on both of them. It’s easy to write this off as two terrible people being terrible to each other, which is totally fair. Assuming that everything Lily alleges in the album is true, then again… yikes. If it can help even one woman recognize that they are in a bad relationship, then it’s good that Lily got her story out there. I feel bad for Lily’s daughters in this whole mess. One of the songs muses about how Lily wants to protect David by telling them that the divorce was “mutual” but they’re both teenagers. If they didn’t know before, they’re going to know now.

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