It seemed for a while that Lily Allen had called time on her pop career. Her last album, No Shame, was released in 2018, and since then she’s spent her time taking an acting roles and starting a successful podcast (Miss Me?, with her friend Miquita Oliver).
It was announced this week, though, that Allen is set to return. West End Girl, her fifth album, will be released on Friday (24 October) - it contains 14 brand new songs that were written and recorded over a 10- day period in Los Angeles starting in Dec 2024, and later finished in London and New York.
“I’m nervous”, Allen says of the upcoming release. “The record is vulnerable in a way that my music perhaps hasn’t been before – certainly not over the course of a whole album. I’ve tried to document my life in a new city and the events that led me to where I am in my life now.
“At the same time, I’ve used shared experiences as the basis for songs which try to delve into why we humans behave as we do, so the record is a mixture of fact and fiction which I hope serves as a reminder of how stoic yet also how frail we humans can be. In that respect I think it’s very much an album about the complexities of relationships and how we all navigate them. It’s a story.......”
In an interview with Perfect magazine, Allen says that there have been many times over the past seven years when she considered calling time on her music career: “I was writing pretty consistently throughout the last four years, but I just didn’t think it was any good,” she explains.
Allen also confirms that West End Girl is a work of autofiction and tells the story of a broken marriage - the star’s relationship with actor David Harbour is believed to have ended in 2024 - but it turns out that it wasn’t just personal trauma that inspired her to get back in the studio.
In 2022, Allen joined Olivia Rodrigo on stage at Glastonbury to perform Allen’s 2009 hit F**k You. They dedicated this to the US Supreme Court, which had just overturned the Roe vs Wade verdict from 1973 that embedded abortion rights into the constitution.
The two artists reunited a couple of years later to duet on Smile, Allen’s 2006 debut single, and Allen says that it was these cameos that convinced her that maybe she wasn’t done with music after all.
Asked how she’d have felt if she hadn’t returned, Allen says: “I think it would always have niggled at me. Because those performances with Olivia Rodrigo triggered me, in a way. When I’ve been up on those stages with those audiences, I’ve thought, ‘I really enjoy this.’ It was just annoying that I couldn’t come up with anything good enough to justify doing it.”
Allen says that being back on stage reminded her that “Oh, shit, this is fun!”, but didn’t want to pursue a comeback until she felt that she had new material that was good enough. And although making West End Girl wasn’t easy, she says, she seems happy with how it turned out.
“It was incredibly manic, and it was emotionally traumatic,” she says of the writing and recording process. “But nothing felt forced. It just sort of fell out of me. And I think that’s what happens when you’re writing from a place of truth, and without an agenda.”
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.