Lily Allen has announced her fifth studio album West End Girl, due for release on 24th October. The record marks her first new music in six years and follows a period in which she’s become as well known for her writing and acting as for her pop career.
Made in collaboration with producer Blue May, the album draws on Allen’s move to New York and the changes that followed. She describes it as a collection of songs about self-awareness and the shifting ground between fact and fiction. “I’m nervous,” she said. “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.”
“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.”
West End Girl features 14 new songs and was executive produced by Allen alongside Seb Chew, Kito and Blue May. The cover art and illustrations come from Spanish artist Nieves González, whose bright, figurative work frames the record’s mix of introspection and playfulness.
The album arrives almost exactly 19 years after her debut Alright, Still, which turned Allen into one of British pop’s most distinctive voices. Since then she’s built a reputation for writing that mixes humour, honesty and social observation, though in recent years her creative focus has shifted. Her memoir My Thoughts Exactly earned widespread praise for its candour, and she’s since taken on major stage roles in 2:22 A Ghost Story and The Pillowman.
West End Girl finds her returning to music with a clearer sense of purpose, shaped by distance and experience rather than reinvention.
