Lily Allen is back – and she has something to say! After seven years away from the studio, British pop’s sharp-tongued storyteller has announced his fifth album, “West End Girl”no later than 24 October via BMG.
The record marks a bold new chapter for Allen, who last released “No Shame” 2018. Written and recorded during a ten-day series in Los Angeles in late 2024, “West End Girl” finds Allen turning his lens inward and exploring the messy middle ground between reinvention and reflection.
“I’m nervous,” Lily admits. “The record is vulnerable in a way that maybe my music hasn’t been before – certainly not over the course of an entire album. 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. At the same time, I’ve used shared experiences as the basis for songs that try to delve into why we humans behave the way we do, so it’s a mix of fact and hope to remind us of stoic but also how weak we humans can be. In that In that regard, I think it’s very much an album about the complexities of relationships and how we all navigate them. It’s a story…”
Produced by longtime employee Blue May (Kano, Joy Cookes, Loyle Carner)next Seb Chew and One morethe 14-track album traces the contours of modern womanhood through Allen’s signature blend of biting wit and emotional honesty. The sessions stretched from Los Angeles to London and New York, giving the record a transcontinental pulse that reflects the dislocation at its heart.
Allen may have been silent, but her echo grew louder. Billie Eilish remembers crying the first time she heard it ‘Smiling’. Olivia Rodrigo — who invited Allen to perform ‘Damn you’ with her at Glastonbury in protest of the US Supreme Court — crediting her with showing how “say what the hell you want”. And PinkPantheress put it best: “Allen made it feel cool to sound like yourself”.
Even though she put down the microphone, Lily didn’t disappear – she just changed the spotlight. She made it to the West End with acclaimed turns in 2:22 A ghost story and The pillow manbefore embodying Ibsen’s doomed heroine in a fierce reimagining of Hedda Gabler. Beyond the stage, she was reunited with her best friend Miquita Oliver for the award-winning podcast miss mewhere their candid conversations hit the same nerve as Allen’s sharpest lyrics.
Now with “West End Girl”Lily Allen returns to planet pop just when we need her most. With its themes of love, displacement and self-discovery, the record feels like the kind of comeback that only Lily could make: a grown-up bill with the same sharp edge that made her voice impossible to ignore nearly two decades ago.
Pre-save “West End Girl” here
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