Lily Allen announces her fifth studio album West End Girl; to be released on October 24, via BMG. The record, Lily’s first in seven years, features 14 brand new songs, written and recorded over an intense 10-day period in Los Angeles starting in Dec 2024, and later finished in London and New York.
All 14 songs were written by Lily, mainly in collaboration with her musical director Blue May. The album’s executive producers are Lily Allen, Seb Chew, Kito and Blue May. The cover art and illustrations were made by renowned Spanish artist Nieves González.
Long a defining and maverick voice of contemporary pop, Lily’s first two albums – her 2006 debut Alright, Still and its follow-up It’s Not Me, It’s You reimagined pop stardom for the internet age, selling more than 5 million copies worldwide. Her Mercury-nominated 2018 album No Shame and explosively candid memoir My Thoughts Exactly cemented her reputation as one of music’s sharpest truth-tellers, before she announced she was stepping away from music.
In her absence Allen’s influence only deepened. Billie Eilish has spoken about crying the first time she heard “Smile”. Olivia Rodrigo, who invited Allen to perform “Fuck You” at Glastonbury in protest at the US Supreme Court, credits her with showing how to “say what the fuck you want”. PinkPantheress, another admirer, put it simply: “Allen made sounding like yourself feel cool”.
Allen herself turned to new stages and formats, starring in sold-out runs of ‘2:22 A Ghost Story’ and ‘The Pillowman’ plus a recent starring role in a new adaptation of Ibsen’s devastating domestic tragedy ‘Hedda Gabler’. She also became the co-host of the award-winning podcast Miss Me, with her best friend Miquita Oliver.
Now with West End Girl Lily Allen pivots the spotlight back on herself, using her move to New York as the basis for a narrative journey within 14 new songs – an outstandingly candid and accomplished fusion of fact and fiction which is undoubtedly the most expansively empathetic work of her career.
“I’m nervous”, the writer/singer reveals. “The record is vulnerable in a way that my music perhaps hasn’t been before – certainly not over the course of a whole 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 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. It’s a story.……”