Lily Allen has announced details of a long-awaited new album called ‘West End Girl’, which she describes as her most “vulnerable” record to date.
The new album will be shared on October 24 via BMG, and marks her fifth studio album and first new LP in seven years.
She wrote and recorded all 14 songs over an intense 10 day period in Los Angeles starting last December, and added the finishing touches earlier this year in London and New York. The tracks were written by Allen in collaboration with musical director Blue May, and the two of them were joined by Seb Chew and Kito as executive producers too.
“I’m nervous. The record is vulnerable in a way that my music perhaps hasn’t been before – certainly not over the course of a whole album,” Allen shared. “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.”
Visit here to pre-order ‘West End Girl’.
Today’s confirmation of her upcoming fifth album arrives just days after it was revealed over the weekend that the ‘LDN’ singer was gearing up to share new music imminently.
Speaking to British Vogue recently, Allen said that an upcoming album was set to be announced any day now, and had been recorded in a mere “16 days” late last year. She also insinuated that it explores the dissolution of her marriage to Stranger Things actor David Harbour after reports of alleged infidelity on his part.
Before then, the singer got fans’ hopes up for new music when she said last month that she’d be taking a hiatus from the Miss Me? podcast to “go and do some new stuff for a little bit”.
Rumours of new music following up from 2018’s ‘No Shame’ stem back to 2020, when Allen said that she had finished working on a new album and was writing for three musicals; though that supposed album was never released.
In 2023, she said that she had returned to the studio following her special guest performance at Olivia Rodrigo’s Glastonbury set in 2022 – saying that it started “sparking something” in her to write new music.
In 2024, she teased that she had written around 50 new songs for her upcoming album, and at the start of 2025 she said she was “trying to manifest” getting a new album “out by the end of the year”.
In the time since her last album in 2018, Allen has taken on a variety of other projects, including making a theatre debut in the 2021 play 2:22 A Ghost Story, followed by 2023’s The Pillowman. On-screen she has played Elizabeth Taylor in the 2019 film How To Build A Girl and as Mel in the 2023 comedy series Dreamland, and since then she has co-hosted the aforementioned hit podcast Miss Me? with Miquita Oliver.
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