If dating and listening to other people’s disastrous relationship stories have taught me anything, it’s this: if you tell your partner that you just landed the lead role in a play, and they say anything other than “congratulations,” it’s time to pack your bags.
So, with Season 5 of Stranger Things finally dropping, let’s talk about David Harbour….’s ex-wife, Lily Allen’s newest album, West End Girl. If anyone was ever destined to write a soundtrack to a marriage imploding, it’s Allen: the same woman who once released a diss track about her own brother, slapping his name on the title, all for being lazy.
Allen’s songwriting has always been ruthlessly expositional, which is why it’s so fun. She remembers everything. Every micro-red flag, every bruised-over conversation, every Bergdorf receipt. All stored away in her Notes app until she’s ready to turn it into art. West End Girl is the eruption: a razor-sharp, darkly funny, emotionally unfiltered album she wrote in just ten days.
Most people remember Allen and Harbour as that oddball celebrity couple. The ones who got hitched in Vegas and took wedding photos at an In-N-Out, or the duo with the Brooklyn townhouse everyone adored in their episode of Architectural Digest. In just about 45 minutes, the album shatters this curated image of a fun-quirky-marriage to absolute pieces, track by track. As it turns out, Harbour wasn’t quite as “open” to being a good husband as he was to the idea of an open marriage.
I’ve always believed that a freakishly good memory is both a gift and a curse. The best artists remember it all — Lena Dunham comes to mind — they’re people who can reconstruct a story with all the ugly details intact. That’s how you write something so specific, so personal, that strangers end up seeing themselves reflected in it. The curse? You’ll have to bear with all the gruesome details you’d trade anything to forget. The gift? You’re able to bring someone straight into the chapters of your life with your divorce album.
Take ‘4Chan Stan,‘ for example. She transports us straight into their bedroom: she’s standing at Harbour’s bedside drawer, and she finds a hefty receipt of him shopping at Bergdorf’s on May 24. She has never owned a Bergdorf bag, or been gifted one. So… who’s the lucky recipient? She doesn’t dress it up. She doesn’t choose to hide behind metaphors that take a whole village to decipher. Instead, she just tosses the memory at us with the energy of a friend halfway through brunch, mimosa in hand, whispering: “Oh, by the way, my husband has a secret collection of sex toys, possibly a mistress named Madeline, and our million-dollar townhouse is actually his Pussy Palace!”
But ultimately, once you scratch away the humour, the irony, and the sarcasm, West End Girl is excruciatingly sad. A single line in the third track ‘Sleepwalking’ says it all, “I could preserve all of your fantasies, if only you could act them all out with me.” In the end, despite everything he’s inflicted on her, she just yearns for him to return the affection she was promised. Call it berating, call it naive — desire simply doesn’t care.
The album is about her unfulfilled longing: wanting to be wanted, never getting it, and worst of all, getting blamed for it. It’s a universal humiliation anyone can recognise from the end of a dying relationship. That awful moment you realise you’re being punished for wanting to be chosen or touched, things that came so naturally at the start. You sit there wondering, “Why did I put myself through this? Will it ever get better?”
And so, you look for validation wherever you can find it, the same way she does in ‘Dallas Major,‘ one of my personal favourites on the album. She sings to us that ‘Dallas Major’ is the fake alias she adopts while chatting with strangers, and then comes clean, “I hate it here.” She hates her life. Hates that her marriage is collapsing, that her fame is fading, that nothing about her feels desirable anymore. And most of all, she hates that she’s sitting in front of these strangers, reaching for a kind of affection she never even wanted in the first place.
Yet for all its devastation, the album ends up feeling strangely hopeful. She’s definitely airing out her dirty laundry, but she’s also pointing fingers back at him in ‘Fruityloop‘ the same way he pointed them at her for years. The marriage that was supposedly “open” is now permanently, formally, and lyrically closed. She’s no longer waiting for her chance to play tennis with him.
There’s a lot of debate about whether it’s corny to write about romance, the good and the bad, once you’ve aged out of the screaming-into-your-pillow territory. But honestly? The existence of West End Girl proves that age is in no way a disadvantage, especially when it comes to writing about pain. If anything, it sharpens your pen, because you’ve lived through life enough to know exactly what you’re losing.
At the end of the day, pushing aside all the tortured poets, it genuinely comes down to whether someone is a good writer. A good one can pull you directly into their shoes with a single lyric. There’s no need to switch up your entire voice or force yourself to write songs about doing your taxes just because you’ve celebrated another birthday. Good storytelling transcends age; the rest is just noise.
And with Harbour back in the spotlight, juggling press junkets on one hand, and a frantic reputation on another, one might wonder if he deserves sympathy, or if Lily Allen’s artistic expression is simply too harsh. But exposition through art has always existed; it’s one of the most enduring reasons why people create. As Mitski once loosely put it, what is pain if not material to transform into art?
Sure, this album isn’t exactly handing out flowers, and it may very well affect the reputation of an emotionally abusive husband. But… stranger things have happened. So, who are we to judge?
