West End Girl: Parasociality, Performance, and Perversion. How Lily Allen reconceptualises the break-up album

Lily Allen, West End Girl (2025)

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★

In five months’ time, I will be turning 22. These double digits are sold to young women as our most fun and frivolous age, the last hurrah of our girlhoods before reality kicks in. Think Taylor Swift, her girl squad, and that bloody black fedora. It is an image that I aspired to for a long time, an image promising freedom, spontaneity, and messiness. And it was okay to indulge this fantasy because, when the clock struck twelve on our next birthday eve, we would sober up and open a savings account. Our skirts would get longer; our hair would get shorter. Our unserious university boyfriend would become our very-serious partner, and we would adopt a cat together and name it Fluffy. Everything would simply just be okay because this is how things are done… right?

I am, however, dissatisfied with this model. A few weeks ago, Vogue asked “Is having a boyfriend embarrassing now?”. To be clear, this title is clickbait and there is nothing at all wrong with being in a happy and healthy relationship. What Chante Joseph put to paper here, however, was an observation my friends and I have articulated over coffee and at the pub countless times: having a boyfriend is neither a marker of achievement nor is it our end goal. And that is because, for very real reasons, young women like me are pessimistic about the future of relationships and sex. This includes ghosting, wokefishing, and gender-based violence.

Lily Allen’s newest album West End Girl lands well within this discourse. In 2008, the loud-mouthed London girl ridiculed her partner’s pitiful attempt at foreplay and said “Fuck You” to small-minded bigots. By 2020, she was the owner of a Brooklyn brownstone, married to actor David Harbour, and sporting the bluntest French bob I have ever seen. She and her Architectural Digest-approved home became the blueprint. And yet with this stellar album, Allen shows how this façade came crashing down. Recorded in just sixteen days, this is Lily at her realest: she is on Tinder, she is a bad mother, and she’s married to a sex addict. I wrote this article with my friend Emma to honour how this album has been received as a conversation piece, particularly amongst our peers. Sitting on my bed, my washing drying in the corner, we had two spoons and a Tesco tiramisu between us. What follows borders on the unhinged at times, but it situates West End Girl as the ultimate postmodern break-up album.

West End Girl should be approached as a one-woman show. Its title alone conveys theatricality. The album also naturally divides itself into two distinct acts, with “Pussy Palace” serving as the central crux, marking the transition from bewilderment to disgust. Emma described “Pussy Palace” to me as the “Defying Gravity” of the album. While I initially laughed at this comparison, I eventually realised its aptness: the image of a great man collapses when he reveals himself, like Oz the Great and Powerful, to be disturbingly unoriginal. The first half of the album is devoted to Allen coming to this revelation. The juxtaposition of the superficial elevator music of “West End Girl” to the electronic bass, autotune, and distortion of “Ruminating” masterfully reflects the collapse of her marriage. “Sleepwalking” then shines as its most lyrically interesting song. Here, Allen inexplicably combines the pitiful image of Oliver Twist begging for more with the lines “I know you’ve made me your Madonna, I want to be your whore”. What results is an image of desperation that is so perverted, as Allen degrades herself in an attempt to recapture her husband’s attention. “Madeline” later follows: beginning with a guitar and banjo, and interspersed with gunshots, this song evokes a Western standoff and the most infamous ‘other woman’ of music history, Dolly Parton’s red-haired Jolene. The second act, beginning with “4chan Stan” but led most forcefully by “Nononogamummy”, sees Allen attempting to embrace her open marriage (despite her reservations), realising her husband’s need for sexual gratification with strangers is, at this point, insatiable. She assumes an alter ego, “Dallas Major”, and throws herself into online dating, craving validation from faceless men. By the album’s conclusion, however, she reclaims her dignity, accepting that she will never fulfil her husband’s warped model of femininity, stating, “You’re a mess, I’m a bitch”. Importantly, she operationalises London as a setting to regain her sense of self. It would be fair to say Allen’s last two albums offer very little compared to her debut, sophomore, and most recent records, because she Americanised her once charming British sleaziness to widen her audience. In West End Girl, Allen cares far less what critics will have to say.

I regard this album as the epitome of the failing monogamous heterosexual model. Dating online introduces capitalist consumption into the most intimate area of our life, ultimately depersonalising what should be a very personal experience. Instead, there are endless opportunities for immediate sexual conquests that encourage people to constantly seek out the next best product. And women are entirely subject to this process. As Allen shows, we age out, we become less interesting, and the once-indomitable institution of marriage doesn’t protect us as we can be as quickly replaced as we were found.

The explicitness of the album has unsurprisingly led to a torrent of online buzz about Allen’s relationship, which Emma rightly argues reduces the artistry of this album to one big, sexy gossip session. Allen is outsmarting people who assumed they knew anything about her marriage from one quick Instagram scroll. She leans into the fascination with her relationship (even staging the album’s photoshoot in her beloved townhouse) and subverts our perception of it with the uncensored truth. This candidness, however, makes people uncomfortable as it admits women to be something we cannot ever be: imperfect. Jennifer Jasmine White offers a brilliant commentary here, stating, “we beg for famous women’s secrets only to performatively recoil once they are offered up”. What White highlights is the way in which we consume the most intimate thoughts of female artists in an almost pornographic way. We become voyeurs to their pain and adore how it manifests itself in her much-anticipated album. One need only think of the response to Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department, with audiences speculating “who-is-who” and “who-said-what” immediately upon its release. When these women ‘settle down’, we then assume they will become less musically interesting, as commentaries on Swift’s relationship with Travis Kelce show. But when these women behave questionably and are unapologetic about doing so, people turn their backs. Whether they admit it, they prefer the fatalistic yearning or passive acceptance of heartbreak songs offered by the likes of Olivia Dean or Role Model. Fans (and I use this term loosely) get on TikTok and sensationalise what they think has happened so as to not truly engage with its ramifications: they try to identify Madeline, they make crappy edits, and fuel rumour and innuendo. They delude themselves into thinking they are any different from Allen, that the Hinge notification buzzing in their pocket will be true love this time.

The traditional break-up album is no longer as compelling for many in my generation of young women, characterised increasingly (albeit not entirely) by their romantic cynicism. Indeed, the reason BRAT summer exercised such a cultural chokehold was because audiences craved this sense of sloppiness and singledom. Allen’s deconstruction of the myth of the celebrity fairytale speaks further to their misgivings. Your husband will be woke for the first six months of marriage, but by the time of your paper anniversary, you might find yourself plucking long hairs from bedsheets, knowing these are not yours. For the optimal listening experience, Emma recommends you listen to this album alone in your kitchen at night, with a glass of wine. I suggest you opt for it next time you find yourself wondering if or when he will text you back. Indecent, unfiltered, and wonderfully imprudent, West End Girl is sensational. Welcome back Lily Allen.