West End Girl Is One Of The Most Raw Breakup Albums – Maybe Ever

Themes such as love, relationships and heartbreak have dominated the music and songwriting scene since the very beginning. Love and loss are such intense experiences that bring out so many emotions no matter what the result, so naturally people turn to music to try and grapple with their feelings.

These experiences have created some of the best songs and musicians out there. But it’s been a long while since someone has explored the breakdown of a relationship, a marriage in particular, in such a raw and unabashed way as Lily Allen has done with her latest album, West End Girl.

Allen’s new album follows a whole seven years after her last album, No Shame, released in 2018. West End Girl consists of fourteen songs, and follows the breakdown of her four year long marriage with actor David Harbour. Written over the very brief course of ten days, this album serves as an auto-fictional account of the whirlwind of grief, anger, confusion, self-consciousness and finally acceptance that Allen grappled with as her marriage fell apart in front of her. 

 

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West End Girl shows us that Allen isn’t just a songwriter, she’s a storyteller. This album is something like a scene by scene follow through of how her marriage to David went from a fairytale to a tragedy over a brief course of time. The album opens with the title track ‘West End Girl’ which starts off with an upbeat tone as Allen sings about moving to New York with her love and her two daughters.

At a point somewhere in the middle of the song, the mood shifts when the singer tells her husband that she’s been offered a role in a West End play, likely a reference to her revered debut role in 2:22 – A Ghost Story. After this announcement, the singer notices that her husband’s “demeanour changed”, and from that point on the image of a perfect and happy marriage is shattered before the second song.

The song ends with Allen on the phone with her husband. Although the listener can’t hear what he is saying on the other end of the phone, it sounds like he’s giving her bad news, or proposing a new idea regarding their relationship that hurts her. Allen sounds confused, hurt, and ultimately defeated, as she reluctantly agrees to his new terms and tells him that she just wants him to be happy. She ends the call with “I love you.”

The following song, ‘Ruminating’ explores the spiral that her husband’s absence and infidelity has sent her down. She’s constantly overthinking while he’s away, imagining other women sleeping with him. The song goes deeper when she starts to realise that it might not just be about sex for him, and that he’s been forming deeper connections with these other women. 

In this album, Lily Allen also opens up about her reluctant attempt to tolerate an open marriage for her husband’s sake. This is presumably what he was suggesting during the phone call in the first song. In her song ‘Madeleine’, Allen reaches out to a fictional mistress to see if they’re really just hooking up or actually falling in love. This song is a pivotal moment in the album, because it shows us how lost, vulnerable and insecure this relationship made Allen feel.

Although many artists write songs about heartbreak and failed relationships that they’ve experienced, very few of them are willing to break down that wall that celebrities put up which allows them to maintain some sense of privacy around their personal lives while still sounding relatable to their audience. In West End Girl, Allen blows that wall up.

This recount of her experience is real, she’s not hiding anything from us, it’s gritty and ugly and crazy the whole way through. It’s clear that Allen wrote these songs as a way to cope and heal, to help her navigate her way through a situation that, at the moment, can very easily seem impossible to get through. This album doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not. There’s no break from the heartbreak, no forced relatability, it’s just 100% her.