Lily Allen is readying her return with West End Girl, her first studio album in seven years. The musician hasn’t released any newly penned music since No Shame in 2018. Eager for the release, Allen has scheduled the album to arrive on Friday, Oct. 24.
“I’m nervous,” Allen said in a statement. “The record is vulnerable in a way that my music perhaps hasn’t been before – certainly not over the course of a whole album.” The album came together quickly. The singer-songwriter wrote and recorded the project over 10 days in Los Angeles late last year before completing it between New York and London.
New York is a significant character on the record, which reflects on the time Allen spent living in the city after moving there in 2020. That year, she married actor David Harbour. Four years later, the couple divorced with Allen eventually returning to London.
“I’ve tried to document my life in a new city and the events that led me to where I am in my life now,” Allen said. “At the same time, I’ve used shared experiences as the basis for songs which try to delve into why we humans behave as we do, so the record is a mixture of fact and fiction which I hope serves as a reminder of how stoic yet also how frail we humans can be. In that respect I think it’s very much an album about the complexities of relationships and how we all navigate them.”
During an episode of her Miss Me? podcast with Miquita Oliver in January, Allen expressed a desire to release music this year, but framed the goal as wishful thinking. “Firstly, I’m going to go and get my head straight for a bit,” she said. “I’m doing a little bit of work on myself in this beginning period of the year, then I’m going to do some more writing, then I’m going to do my play, hopefully, maybe get an album out by the end of the year. That would be nice, wouldn’t it? It’s not real, I’m just trying to manifest it now.”
Her manifestation came true in the form of 14 songs created with her music director Blue May. In 2018, around the release of No Shame, Allen told Rolling Stone that in an ideal world she would release music “just all at once,” adding, “I’d just drop a whole album.” Now, she’s getting that wish, too.
West End Girl Track List
1. “West End Girl”
2. “Ruminating”
3. “Sleepwalking”
4. “Tennis”
5. “Madeline”
6. “Relapse”
7. “Pussy Palace”
8. “4chan Stan”
9. “Nonmonogamummy”
10. “Just Enough”
11. “Dallas Major”
12. “Beg for Me”
13. “Let You W/In”
14. “Fruityloop”
