Lily Allen’s West End Girl Review: Brutal, unafraid and sonically brilliant

An intimate, unvarnished retelling of the breakdown of her marriage, experimental yet cohesive. Lily Allen tells all, and she means all.

Listening feels like eavesdropping on gossip your not supposed to hear, slightly immoral but deliciously captivating. Written and recorded over just 10 days, it has that raw, still-warm quality of something that didn’t have time to be second-guessed into blandness. Taylor’s ‘Reputation’ gave it a good go, but West End Girl might just be THE revenge album of all revenge albums.

After her first two albums helped define the sound of British late-naughties pop, the projects that followed never quite landed with the same cultural punch. West End Girl changes that. It’s already being dubbed her Lemonade, not because it tries to mimic Beyoncé’s grandness, but because it’s a raw, unflinching reckoning.

Lily’s storytelling is unrivalled, it’s very rare for a songwriter to be so honest and do it with conviction instead of hiding behind blankets of metaphors and allude. I certainly wouldn’t want to be a certain Netflix star right now.

With a serious lack of promo, a surprise drop less than a week before release date, how has this album caused so much chaos? Scandal, breakdowns, voicenotes and confessions – West End Girl left very little to the imagination.

West End Girl Album Cover.

From the opener, I was completely invested. And I’ve not been captured so quickly by an album like I have with this, in a long time. We begin at a seemingly high point in Lily’s journey, she’d moved to New York with her children, just been offered the lead in a west end play and has bought a huge new house. This perfect image quickly unravels as she details how she really feels.

Ruminating feels very brat-inspired with the drum and bass paired with autotune over heavy lyrics and sets the tone that the album is experimental whilst the storytelling keeps it cohesive.

The next few songs slip back into that unmistakable Lily Allen DNA, conversational lyrics and ruthless emotional honesty. She lays out the cheating plainly, even name-dropping the woman involved. It’s painfully relatable: the compulsive searching for answers you’re not sure you want, and the gut-punch of finding them anyway. As a girl called Madeleine myself, I briefly considered changing my name and moving to a remote island.

Madeline begins acoustic, then suddenly kicks into a quicker tempo, mirroring the spiral of overthinking and releasing Lily’s internal dialogue. As a girl called Madeleine myself (spelt differently thanks mum) I feel like I ought to go into hiding. Gunshot-sharp percussion and a brilliantly layered production give it this tense, pulsing energy. It’s one of the most interestingly produced moments on the album, and one that feels like classic Lily sharpened to a new point.

On Relapse, Lily leans back into a hazy drum-and-bass pulse, her vocals glazed in just enough autotune to feel dreamlike rather than processed. It captures that dizzy, heart-racing headspace she sings about, “climbing on the walls”, with the production literally swirling her voice in circles mid-track, like the room is spinning with you in it. Then, in the last minute, a heavy club-ready beat drops in and everything snaps into focus: euphoric, messy, and painfully human.

Across the album, Lily uses candid witty humour to mask pain, and Pussy Palace is the clearest example. It’s the moment the penny drops as she realises the apartment she thought was a mancave “dojo” was actually his playground, asking “How’d I get caught up in your double life?”. The Stranger Things-style intro and instantly sticky hook make it a track that will almost certainly fly commercially, even as it lands with a very real sting.

Strip away the scandal and the chatter, and what’s left is something deeply sincere: an album that cuts close to the bone, packed with honesty, humour, and that particular brand of Lily relatability we’ve been missing.

This feels like a real comeback, the kind that shifts the room. She’s unapologetically herself again, and the music finally has the space to match that. West End Girl sounds tour-ready, culturally loud, and built to last, the sort of album people will look back on as a marker in her career, and in ours. People will remember this one, you heard it here first.