Lily Allen and David Harbour.
Photo: WireImage
Lily Allen’s first album in seven years “fuses fact and fiction” as it traces the breakdown of an open marriage. Recorded over ten days following her 2024 breakup from Stranger Things actor David Harbour, whom she married in 2020, it’s hard not to picture him as the subject of the lyrical cheating allegations. “I made this record in December 2024 and it was a way for me to process what was happening in my life,” Allen told British Vogue in an October 17 profile. The 14-track project tells the entire story of the split in chronological order, from the first inklings of cheating, to an unwanted open relationship, and into the post-breakup blues. Allen has experience working through it, and it shows on West End Girl.
The album about their end begins with the couple moving to New York for his acting career (Allen and Harbor famously toured their Brooklyn brownstone in a 2023 Architectural Digest video). Then, Allen books a show on the West End, which she’s done twice: 2021’s 2:22 A Ghost Story (for which she was nominated for an Olivier Award) and 2023’s The Pillowman. “That’s when your demeanor started to change,” Allen sings. “You said that I’d have to audition, I said ‘You’re deranged’ / And I thought / I thought that that was quite strange.” Then, in the very next song, “Ruminating,” the cheating suspicions have set in. “I can’t shake the image of her naked / On top of you, and I’m disassociated,” she sings. “And I’m not hateful, but you make me hate her / She gets to sleep next to my medicator.” In his words, she recalls how the relationship was forced open while she’s still in the West End. “I told you, all of this has been too brutal,” she sings. “You told me that you felt the same, it’s mutual / And then you came out with this line so crucial / Yeah, ‘If it has to happen, baby do you want to know?’”
From there, the open relationship springs. On the standout track “Madeline,” she sings about seeing a message from a woman who her husband has been sleeping with: “We had an arrangement / “Be discreet and don’t be blatant / There had to be payment / It had to be with strangers / But you’re not a stranger, Madeline.” Allen, who has been sober since 2019, admits she struggled with feeling the “need to be numb” in “Relapse.” On another track, “Dallas Major,” she sings about sleeping with another man, giving him her fake name but real story: “So I go by Dallas Major but that’s not really my name / You know I used to be quite famous, that was way back in the day / Yes, I’m here for validation and I probably should explain / How my marriage has been open since my husband went astray.”
By the end of the album, Allen is not despondent anymore — she’s angry. On the penultimate track, “Let You W/In,” she refuses to “absorb” his shame, adding they “lie to the children the ending was mutual.” Finally, on “Fruityloop,” Allen has reclaimed the narrative of the breakup and is refusing to let him put the problems back onto her. “You’re just a little boy looking for his mummy,” she sings. “Things have gotten complicated what with all the fame and money.”
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