Lily Allen’s ‘West End Girl’ proves the scorched-earth breakup album is a smart PR move

• Lily Allen’s new album, “West End Girl,” is a breakup album of epic proportions.
• By telling the story through music, Allen has both narrative control and plausible deniability.
• Beyoncé, Ariana Grande, and Taylor Swift have also used breakup albums as savvy PR moves.

Last week, Lily Allen sent the celebrity gossip machine into overdrive when she seemed to reveal the sordid specifics of her and an ex’s open relationship: “We had an arrangement. Be discreet and don’t be blatant. There had to be payment, it had to be with strangers.”

The British singer and actor didn’t stop there. She described the pang of epiphany she felt walking into her ex’s West Village apartment, finding sheets strewn across the floor and secret sex toys stashed in a Duane Reade bag: “So am I looking at a sex addict?”

None of these details were revealed in a tell-all interview with a journalist, a breakup statement approved by a publicist, or even a shady posted-then-deleted Instagram Story. Instead, Allen did as many modern pop stars tend to do: she let her lyrics do the talking.

Allen’s new album, “West End Girl,” clearly addresses a husband character on every track, detailing the dissolution of the narrator’s marriage with brutal specificity. It’s the kind of specificity that the real-life Allen, who married “Stranger Things” star David Harbour in 2020, seems to deliberately be avoiding in the press since news of their split broke in February. Whether for legal or personal reasons, Allen has been careful to hedge when asked about the album’s inspiration, describing its narrator as an alter-ego (also named Lily Allen) and its characters as proxies for real people.

Even while describing Harbour as her “ex-husband” in a recent interview with British Vogue, Allen gave no clarity about divorce proceedings or co-parenting arrangements when pressed. “You’ll have to ask him,” she demurred. (Harbour, for his part, has stayed mum since the album’s release. Asked about his split with Allen in an April interview with GQ, he said he doesn’t engage with tabloid news “because it’s all based on hysterical hyperbole.”

But fans don’t need explicit confirmations from either party to plot Allen’s “West End Girl” lyrics on a timeline. The album’s opening track recounts the purchase of an expensive New York City brownstone; in 2023, Allen and Harbour gave a viral Architectural Digest tour of a home matching that description. In the same song, Allen’s narrator notices her partner becoming envious when she’s offered the lead role in a play without having to audition; listeners promptly resurfaced a photo of the “bad luck flowers” that Harbour sent Allen in 2021, when she made her West End debut in “2:22: A Ghost Story.”

In an era where the internet provides a seemingly bottomless well of content about celebrities’ relationships, from detailed timelines of their marriages to quotes from archival interviews to screenshots of old social media activity, it’s nearly impossible for celebrities to prevent their private lives from becoming public consumption. Sometimes, as the tabloids close in, an artist’s best defense is to tell all — with some creative license, of course.

The musical tell-all is a time-tested tradition

Since her arrival in the music industry, Allen has delighted in blunt, confessional lyricism. Her 2006 debut album, “Alright, Still,” opens with the popular kiss-off “Smile” and ends with a brutal put-down named after her real-life brother, “Game of Thrones” actor Alfie Allen. “Get off your lazy arse, Alfie, please use your brain,” she sings.

Later that same year, another confessional songwriter released her self-titled debut album, in which she literally name-drops two of her high school crushes: Taylor Swift.

Allen and Swift are far from the only musicians to deploy a songwriting style that invites fans to draw real-life connections to their lyrics. Musicians have always mined their private lives for inspiration, and breakup albums like Marvin Gaye’s “Here, My Dear” and Alanis Morissette’s “Jagged Little Pill” became iconic for this very reason.

But over the last two decades, as the public’s access to information has expanded exponentially with the rise of online media and social networks, our eagerness to fact-check songs has expanded to match. By 2010, it wasn’t hard for Swifties to trace the inspiration for the scathing track “Dear John” back to Swift’s rumored fling with John Mayer. Whether Swift was intentionally leading them there or not, tabloids and gossip blogs made the connection on Swift’s behalf, and in the absence of an official confirmation or denial, her lyrics quickly became the dominant narrative.

In 2016, Beyoncé would take that strategy to new heights with “Lemonade.” The singer’s most personal album to date deals directly with themes of infidelity and marital betrayal and arrived after years of tabloid speculation that Jay-Z had cheated on her — speculation fueled by surveillance footage of Beyoncé’s sister, Solange Knowles, berating and kicking Jay-Z in an elevator.

Unlike Swift, whose dating history had been largely pieced together by fans via paparazzi photos, giving her a bit more wiggle room to deflect, Beyoncé and Jay-Z had been married for years. When she sings, “If you try this shit again, you gon’ lose your wife,” and throws her wedding ring at the camera in the visual album, there’s really only one person she could be addressing.

“Lemonade” ends with a redemption arc for the narrator’s husband, and Beyoncé never clarified exactly how autobiographical the album’s content was. Because the album was so thorough, so vulnerable, and so widely acclaimed, she never needed to. The public generally accepted her version of events, and fans pledged their unwavering support. She got her digs in on her own terms, and then she withdrew from the conversation.

It was the best PR move that Beyoncé could have made — for herself and, improbably, for her husband. The album presented Beyoncé as a wife navigating her relationship intentionally and thoughtfully, armed with both righteous fury and unconditional love. When the real-life couple continued to present a united front in public, the music made their reconciliation seem well-earned.

Pop fans love specificity, and pop stars are obliging

In 2018, Ariana Grande followed suit with “Thank U, Next,” released in the aftermath of two of her high-profile breakups — both of which Grande took the brunt of the blame for. In the No. 1 hit single, Grande explicitly name-drops four famous exes and salutes each relationship as a learning experience. The move was hailed by critics as brave and gracious, and in one fell swoop, Grande wrested narrative control back from her detractors. When Grande released her new album, also titled “Thank U, Next,” in 2019, she was further rewarded with millions of sales and several Grammy nominations, including album of the year.

Indeed, in the decade since “Lemonade,” pop fans have witnessed a noticeable uptick in oversharing, particularly when it comes to breakup songs and albums.

Country-pop stars like Miley Cyrus, Kacey Musgraves, and Kelsea Ballerini have released diaristic albums shortly after getting divorced (2020’s “Plastic Hearts,” 2021’s “Star-Crossed,” and 2023’s “Rolling Up the Welcome Mat,” respectively), all of which include thinly veiled references to their famous ex-husbands. Rather than being chastised for violating some kind of privacy covenant, they’ve been applauded for putting their pain on a silver platter for public dissection. After all, that’s what everyone has been incentivized to do in the social media era.

Even Swift, who’s built her billion-dollar empire on songs that feel like diary entries, took this approach a step further on 2024’s “The Tortured Poets Department.” The album’s lyrics feature detailed physical descriptions and hyper-specific references to some of her subjects, leaving very little doubt as to the subject of Swift’s ire.

At the time, the relationship in question was not well-received — even by Swift’s most ardent fans. But in “Poets,” Swift lays out her ex’s perceived indiscretions and broken promises, reframing herself as a lover duped and discarded. Fans who’d previously asked Swift to apologize for dating someone they deemed problematic seemed satisfied with her artistic explanation.

Still, even the most idiosyncratic lyrics allow the artist to maintain some semblance of plausible deniability. Tracks on an album are not the same as chapters in a memoir, no matter how closely they may adhere to real events. Where first-person statements can be legally limiting, art is always open to interpretation, making the latter the superior PR move for compulsive oversharers.

Allen, at least, is aware of this useful loophole.

“I don’t think I could say it’s all true — I have artistic licence,” Allen told The Sunday Times of “West End Girl.” “But yes, there are definitely things I experienced within my relationship that have ended up on this album.”

While she wouldn’t say whether Harbour has heard the album or not, she couldn’t resist exposing the beating heart at its core. “I hide in music,” she said. “It is the musical version of what I do in my life.”

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