Last year, Lily Allen took the world by storm when she released her long-awaited fifth album, West End Girl, to huge critical and commercial acclaim.
As I’m sure you remember, Lily did not hold back on the 14-track record, which seemingly chronicles the messy breakdown of her marriage to Stranger Things actor David Harbour.
To get you up to speed, the two enjoyed a whirlwind romance before tying the knot in 2020, but it was confirmed that they had split in February 2025. While Lily did not publicly comment on their breakup at the time, it was no secret that she was struggling with her mental health in the lead-up to this announcement.
In January 2025, Lily took a break from her podcast, Miss Me?, after telling listeners: “I’m just really not in a good place. I know I’ve been talking about it for months, but I’ve been spiraling and spiraling and spiraling, and it’s got out of control.”
“I can’t concentrate on anything except the pain that I’m going through, and it’s really, really hard,” she went on, also revealing that she’d had a panic attack during the podcast team’s Christmas party a month earlier.
And during an interview with Perfect magazine ahead of West End Girl’s release, Lily shared: “It was hard to make this record. It was incredibly manic, and it was emotionally traumatic.”
She went on to explain that the record was her way “of processing things” she was going through in her “private life,” so when it told the unfiltered story of Lily being left heartbroken by a partner who forced her into an open relationship, fans were shocked — to say the least.
While Lily never mentions David by name, and has seemingly been “prevented from discussing specifically” the “details about the demise of her recent marriage,” listeners didn’t struggle when it came to putting two and two together, with Lily being brazen and unapologetic as she shared some seriously NSFW details in her songs.
On the album, Lily recalls how her partner asked her to open up their marriage after he was seemingly left resentful of her landing an acting role in London in the summer of 2021. Despite Lily eventually agreeing that he could have sex with other women as long as they were strangers he only ever saw for sex, she was devastated to find out that he ended up having fully-fledged affairs behind her back.
Lily does not hold back throughout the album, singing openly about her past battle with addiction and fighting the temptation to relapse, her struggle with her self-esteem and sense of self-worth, as well as candid confessions about her sex life.
In “Sleepwalking,” for example, Lily reflects on a time when her partner would not be intimate with her after he started having sex with other women. She candidly sings: “I know you’ve made me your Madonna / I want to be your whore / Baby, it would be my honour / Please, sir, can I have some more?”
But it’s “Pussy Palace” that is perhaps the most eyebrow-raising of the bunch, with this song following Lily as she discovers that her partner was secretly using their West Village apartment as his secret sex palace.
“I found a shoebox full of handwritten letters / From brokenhearted women wishing you could have been better / Sheets pulled off the bed / Strewn all on the floor / Long black hair probably from the night before,” she sings. “Duane Reade bag with the handles tied / Sex toys, butt plugs, lube inside / Hundreds of Trojans, you’re so fucking broken / How’d I get caught up in your double life?”
Speaking to CBS Mornings last year, Lily explained that she was able to be so frank in her songs because she coincidentally had the studio time booked before her marriage fell apart towards the end of 2024. When she went into the sessions, she wrote authentically as her way of dealing with the trauma without thinking that she would ever actually share the end result with the world.
“At the time, I wasn’t really even thinking about it as a commercial endeavor,” she explained. “It was an act of desperation, actually. While I was writing it, I wasn’t really sure it was going to see the light of day. Up until relatively close to its release, I was always thinking: ‘Is this something I want to share with the world?’”
Explaining why she ultimately opted to release the album, Lily said that sitting on it for 10 months was “a nightmare,” sharing: “I think it’s sort of stunted my healing process somewhat, and actually, since I’ve put it out, it’s felt completely and utterly liberating. It was kind of hellish having it in the background.”
“It said everything that I needed to say,” she added. “And I felt like I couldn’t really get on with my life until I’d said it.”
Thankfully, releasing the album proved to be the best possible move, with Lily’s career flourishing off the back of it. In fact, the positive response was so overwhelming that Lily admitted to finding it “validating” of how much she struggled at the time. She explained: “To now have people listen to this record and to go: ‘Yeah, that’s really messed up, that’s really painful, I can’t imagine what it would be like to go through something like that’ is like: ‘OK, now I know why I had to drag myself into a treatment center!’”
And while this reaction from strangers across the globe is undoubtedly a good thing, you’d be forgiven for wondering if Lily felt more self-conscious about the people she actually knew in the real world hearing such intimate details about her personal life and deepest, darkest moments.
Now, Lily has opened up about exactly that in a new interview with Elle, where she recalled how the other parents at her children’s school reacted to her lifting the lid on her private life. For reference, Lily shares two daughters with her ex-husband Sam Cooper.
After marrying David, Lily and the girls relocated to New York City, where Lily enjoyed taking a step back from the spotlight to focus on being “a very present parent and being home when they got back from school, cooking them dinner and doing their homework with them.”
“I wanted things to feel relatively normal. I was happy in the sense that I was doing what I wanted to be doing for my kids,” Lily said of this time period. “Whether I felt creatively fulfilled or not is another thing completely. I didn’t manage to find the balance between the two.”
Reflecting on the six years of stability that she was able to give her kids during her and David’s marriage, she added: “I think that it’s paid off. I have a really good relationship with them. They both trust me implicitly, both come to me with their problems, and we solve them together.”
And when asked what the response to West End Girl was like from the parents of other children at her daughters’ school, Lily’s answer was characteristically honest.
“They were there when I was in a really tough spot – they could see how drawn I was and how withdrawn I became and how skinny I got and how sad I was,” she shared. “They’d come and pick up their kids from play dates, and I wouldn’t come downstairs. I’d be in my bedroom crying. And so I think this album came out and they’re all happy for me.”
Following on from this, Lily admitted that she is enjoying the fact that she is back in the spotlight, because it’s for a positive reason. She told Elle: “I love that it’s about my music. I like that people are talking about me again because I’ve done something they think is really good. I’m super grateful that I’ve been here before and that I’m sober this time around. I know nothing is permanent and that these things come and go.”
Let me know your thoughts on Lily’s latest comments, and West End Girl in general, in the comments below!
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