Lily Allen knows her new album, West End Girl, is brutal, but she insists she meant no harm toward her estranged husband and muse, David Harbour.
“It’s not a cruel album,” Allen, 40, told Interview magazine during a Q&A published on Tuesday, October 28. “I don’t feel like I’m being mean. It was just the feelings I was processing at the time.”
Allen wrote and recorded West End Girl in just 10 days in December 2024, the same month that she split from Harbour, 50, after four years of marriage.
“I feel very differently about the whole situation now,” she reflected. “We all go through breakups, and it’s always f***ing brutal. But I don’t think it’s that often that you feel inclined to write about it while you’re in it.”
Some critics have described West End Girl as a “revenge album,” as its emotionally raw lyrics find Allen processing Harbour’s alleged infidelity, but she declared in the interview, “I don’t need revenge.”
“That’s what’s fun about this record; it’s viscerally like going through the motions. At the time, I was really trying to process things, and that’s great in terms of the album, but I don’t feel confused or angry now,” she reiterated.
That said, Allen admitted she wanted the project to “feel brutal and tragic but also empowering” because it was “very important” to her that she “didn’t sound like a victim.”
Harbour has not responded to the bombshell claims on West End Girl publicly — or privately, so it seems. When asked how she thinks the Stranger Things star will react, Allen told the publication, “I try not to think about that.”
Allen released West End Girl on October 24. It is her first album since 2018’s No Shame.
West End Girl has a narrative arc, beginning with Allen and Harbour moving to New York City together, only for the “Smile” singer to return to her native London “all alone” to star in a play soon after.
When Allen eventually goes back to the couple’s Brooklyn brownstone, which they are now selling for nearly $8 million, she claims to have seen a text from a woman named Madeline in her partner’s phone and confronts him — and Madeline.
“How long has it been going on? Is it just sex or is there emotion?” she asks in a song named after the other woman.
As the album progresses, Allen calls out her “sex addict” husband’s “double life” and reveals they had an open marriage once he “went astray.”
Harbour has remained largely tight-lipped about his separation from Allen, speaking about it in only one interview so far.
“I’m protective of the people and the reality of my life,” he told British GQ in April when asked about the breakdown of the exes’ union. “There’s no use in that form of engaging [with rumors] because it’s all based on hysterical hyperbole.”
While this was Harbour’s first marriage, Allen was previously married to Sam Cooper, with whom she shares two daughters: Ethel, 13, and Marnie, 12.
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