In Lily Allen’s world, superstardom isn’t all that. At least, until your husband allegedly asks for an open marriage then hits up the dating apps, forcing you to do the same as a way to get even.
“You know I used to be quite famous, that was way back in the day,” she sings, on track Dallas Major.
She’s doing herself a disservice. When her newest album, West End Girl, dropped on October 24 this year, it did so with the force of an atom bomb. Over night, our timelines and group chats were full of her songs — and what felt like a never-ending Brat summer had been replaced with West End Girl winter.
A new moment was in town, and Allen’s face was everywhere. For some reason, her music had struck a chord: her exposed, vulnerable diary of a failing marriage made people, especially women, lean in.
When you think about the type of musician she is, maybe it’s not surprising. Forged in the fires of the brutal Noughties media, she made her name writing songs — Smile, The Fear — that often hid jaw-droppingly frank lyrics behind their catchy tunes; something she later told Vogue was “music [that] sounds really pretty, and it’s not.”
Allen’s talent for openness has fuelled her music, as well as her other business ventures — such as her hit podcast, Miss Me?, where she talks to old friend Miquita Oliver about everything from abortions to losing one’s virginity.
Tracks written towards the start of her career talk about her brother’s penchant for smoking weed, disappointing lovers and her rage towards exes; West End Girl applied that same candour, this time filtered through Allen’s experience of her marriage to actor Stranger Things actor David Harbour.
When news broke that the pair were separating, most people didn’t give it much thought beyond mourning that beautiful Billy Cotton designed Brooklyn brownstone, as made famous by that AD house tour.
West End Girl changed all that. Suddenly, we were getting what felt like an intimate portrait of a marriage breakdown; a painful, minute dissection of everything that went wrong, laid out on the operating table for us to gawk at.
For Allen, the process of making the album involved slogging through a lot of “confusion, sorrow, grief, helplessness”. And sure, there’s confusion – especially at the start of the album.
We learn that Harbour supposedly held a fair amount of resentment towards Allen for her success in 2:22 A Ghost Story, sending her “bad luck flowers” and calling her his “ambitious wife” in the accompanying card. In West End Girl, Allen notes that getting the role marked a turning point where his “demeanour changed.”
Shortly afterwards, Harbour allegedly asks Allen for an open marriage while she is in London starring in a play, which she reluctantly agrees to. It feels calculated to humiliate, or at least reassert control, and her helplessness feels obvious.
After all, it’s 2025, and we’re supposedly living liberated lives! Monogamy is out; freedom is in. If you complain, you’re boring. Except, of course, it’s rarely that simple.
As things progress, the rules are just another boundary to be ridden roughshod over. Sex has to be paid for, they agree, and should only be with strangers — but a woman named Madeline is appearing on the scene with alarming frequency, and Allen’s protestations are brushed off with a shrug.
Her helplessness, too, we feel in bucketloads. The emotion that comes through most clearly, though, is fury.
“Allen seems to have tapped into a deep vein of female anger about having to pretend to be fine with something you’re not, for fear that otherwise you’ll look uncool or uptight — and then he’ll leave you,” Gaby Hinsliff wrote in the Guardian.
To put it plainly: Allen had exposed the flaws in the modern dating system — one in which women are often strung along, have to pretend to enjoy things they don’t, have to pretend to be ‘cool’ and ‘fun’ when inside they feel anxious, have to endure a situationship because the man they’re seeing isn’t ready for anything ‘serious’.
And that clearly struck a chord.
“This isn’t what sexual liberation was meant to feel like,” Hinsliff added. “It wasn’t supposed to mean squashing your own needs anxiously down to fit some man’s fantasy — whether that involves becoming a downtrodden tradwife or one-third of a throuple — while gamely pretending you want it just as much as he does.”
West End Girl isn’t just Allen railing against the hypocrisy of men like Harbour, though: it’s also revenge. Listening to this is basically listening to her getting her own back in real time: exposing her ex-husband, for the “sad, sad man” that he is and settling the score, with an audience of millions backing her up.
Who hasn’t fantasised about doing the same thing to their ex after a messy breakup? Or, even worse, after he’s been the cause of that breakup? No wonder women wanted to tune in. It’s the ultimate settling of scores, the ultimate final say.
Like it or not — and whether it’s accurate or not, which Allen has remained legally tight-lipped on — the public now think they know exactly what went on inside her marriage to Harbour. And it doesn’t paint a flattering portrait of him.
It’s a masterstroke from Allen, as well as a declaration: she’s not letting mediocre men win anymore. And neither should we.
“I will not absorb your shame,” she sings in Let You W/In. “It was you who put me through this, I could tell myself you'll change/ Do it all again, be deluded, never get your sympathy/ I don't think you're able.
“But I can walk out with my dignity/ If I lay my truth on the table.”
