Perhaps David Harbour should have seen this coming. Lily Allen’s split from the Stranger Things star is the engine behind her bombastic fifth studio album, West End Girl—the pop star’s first in more than seven years. And to say that the same woman who once sang, “You’ve only got yourself to blame / I’m gonna tell the world you’re rubbish in bed now / and that you’re small in the game,” doesn’t pull any lyrical punches would be an understatement.
After its release on Friday, many listeners were shocked by the candor with which the 40-year-old Allen sings about the dissolution of her marriage with 50-year-old Harbour, whom she wed in a Las Vegas ceremony in September 2020. Like all good breakup albums, Allen’s West End Girl is an unflinching look at a relationship in freefall. The 14-track project tells the tale of the split in chronological order, beginning with Allen and Harbour moving to New York with her daughters—Ethel, 13, and Marnie, 12—from her previous marriage to builder Sam Cooper.
Allen and Harbour’s former home, redesigned by Billy Cotton (who gets a shout-out on the album-opener “West End Girl”), serves as the backdrop for the album imagery and is now reportedly on the market for a cool $8 million. But their ornate Brooklyn brownstone, which the couple toured in a 2023 Architectural Digest video that has resurfaced since the album’s release, felt more like a gilded cage to its mistress. In the penultimate track, “Let You W/In,” Allen sings, “I’ve become invisible, stuck here in my palace / I’m so fucking miserable in my rabbit hole, yeah, I’m Alice.”
Recorded in just 10 days following their 2024 separation, “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 of West End Girl in an October 17 profile. Although she hastens to add, “there are things that are on the record that I experienced within my marriage, but that’s not to say that it’s all gospel.”
It’s during this period that Allen books a role on the West End, which she’s done twice now: first in 2021’s 2:22 A Ghost Story (for which she was nominated for an Olivier Award) and then 2023’s The Pillowman. “That’s when your demeanour 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.”
These lyrics led listeners to recirculate the note that Harbour wrote Allen ahead of her West End debut, which reads: “My ambitious wife, these are bad luck flowers, ’cause if you get reviewed well in this play you will get all kinds of awards and I’ll be miserable. Your loving husband.”
A FaceTime call featured in the album’s opening track sets the scene for a shift in Allen’s personal life. Her husband wants to open their marriage, and by track four, “Tennis,” he seems to be engaged in an affair with a woman the couple knows. “Who the fuck is Madeline?” Allen repeatedly cries, a question she answers on the following song of the same name. On “Madeline,” she sings about messaging a woman 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.” In an interview with The Times, Allen insisted that Madeline was “a fictional character,” but a costume designer named Natalie Tippett has claimed in an interview with The Mail On Sunday that she is the mystery woman in question.
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 playfully croons about DM’ing other men under an alias in an effort to appease her husband’s arrangement: “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 opened since my husband went astray.”
Some of the most pointed accusations arrive in the song “Pussy Palace,” in which Allen sings about taking some of her partner’s things to the couple’s West Village apartment, where her husband stayed for a period. While there, she discovered a plastic Duane Reade bag, “with the handles tied / sex toys, butt plugs, lube inside.” Upon finding Pandora’s box, Allen wonders aloud, “am I looking at a sex addict?”
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She manages to make jaws drop further on “Just Enough,” where Allen asks, “Why arе we here talking about vasеctomies? / Did you get someone pregnant? Someone who isn’t me? / Did you take her to the clinic? Did you hold her hand? / Is she having your babies?” On the same song, Allen frets about reentering the dating pool in her 40s: “Look at my reflection, I feel so drawn, so old / I booked myself a facelift, wondering how long it might hold.”
But she sets shame aside on the aforementioned, “Let You W/In,” where Allen refuses to “absorb” Harbour’s shame, adding they “lie to the children the ending was mutual,” but on the final track, “Fruityloop,” Allen says she bears no responsibility in the demise of their romance. “You’re just a little boy looking for his mummy,” she sings. “Things have gotten complicated what with all the fame and money,” adding, “It’s not me, it’s you.”
Turning her broken heart into art has charmed A-list fans like Olivia Rodrigo and Gwyneth Paltrow, who wrote “this album is a masterpiece,” on her Instagram Story. “It will piss off lots of people,” Allen told the Times ahead of West End Girl’s release, but demurred about whether or not Harbour had heard it: “I don’t know if I can answer that.”
Harbour, whose Stranger Things returns for its final season next month, has not publicly addressed the album or his split from Allen. Vanity Fair has reached out to his and her reps for comment.
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