The pop music landscape is currently a loud reminder that love does not always last. And that the heartbreak that follows a split, while painful, can render great art — or at least art that will get the internet talking if you give the people enough juicy details. And this year is shaping up to be a banner year for the tell-all breakup album.
Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires released dueling albums about the dissolution of their marriage; Haim went full-on messy with a summer breakup album; and a 50-year-old song by Fleetwood Mac honestly will not leave the news cycle.
Currently at the front of the group sits British singer Lily Allen, who just released a scorched-earth, confessional album seemingly about her divorce from Stranger Things actor David Harbour. The album, West End Girl, breaks new ground for Allen — and for the art of the breakup record — with its candid, detail-filled account of the heartbreak and betrayal that led to the end of her marriage.
“She’s not sparing a single detail other than the person’s name, which is never on the record,” said Coleman Spilde, senior staff culture writer and critic at Salon. “This is a breakup album that’s also coming at a time where we have this very Taylor Swiftian sort of alternative romance songwriting that is very metaphorical. And Lily is kind of yanking us back to the style of songwriting that is incredibly candid.”
The internet has lost its collective mind over the album, a reaction that signifies how our parasocial age is changing the breakup album’s purpose. Today, Explained co-host Noel King sat down with Spilde to break it all down. Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Tell us: Who is Lily Allen and what did she do?
That is a very interesting and complicated question.
Lily Allen is a British musician and a tabloid fixture, and now she is back with her new album, West End Girl, which is taking her sort of confessional songwriting to the next level by being incredibly honest, straightforward, candid, and revealing every sordid detail about the dissolution of her marriage to David Harbour, the actor from Stranger Things and Marvel fame.
West End Girl tells quite a tale. What is the tale that it is telling?
This is an album about a woman who is really excited to be in this marriage. She’s been swept off her feet by this handsome man, and she’s moving to New York to start her new life with him. We hear that in the opening title track of the album, “West End Girl,” which is sort of a sing-songy introduction to the album.
And then suddenly she gets a call: Her agent has booked her a play. It seems that the nameless person that she’s writing about on the album isn’t quite so happy about that.
Then at the end of this opening track, we hear the recording of a one-sided FaceTime conversation between the two of them, where Lily is sort of talking to the person on the other end of the phone who seems to be asking for — maybe it’s an open marriage; maybe he’s confessing infidelity; maybe he’s asking for a certain kind of marriage arrangement.
Then she is sort of thrust into this anxiety spiral, which a lot of listeners can probably relate to if they’ve ever been in any kind of torrid relationship.
You have the follow-up track, the second track on the album, “Ruminating” — this frenetic drum & bass song. She’s remembering this line that he told her over the phone: “If it has to happen, baby, do you want to know?” The end of the song, she just repeats [her reaction] — “what a fucking line” — over and over and over again.
And then through the rest of the first half of the album, she’s throwing back-to-back songs like “Tennis” and “Madeline.” “Tennis” is all about coming home from London to find that her partner may have been texting another woman. She’s asking over and over, “Who is Madeline? Who the fuck is Madeline?” The very next song is answering that question. So it’s sort of like a call-and-response that really invites the listener to have a lot of fun with it.
What are we supposed to be feeling by the time we finish?
It sort of flips a little bit to go a bit more introspective, thinking about, What can I do to be part of this relationship as he wants it to be? What can I do to make him happy? What sacrifices can I make?
You have songs like “Non-Monogamummy,” where Lily is kind of wrestling with her traditional ideas of motherhood and then being a mother who is also nonmonogamous, which doesn’t quite fit for her. And then you have the sort of coda of the album, where she is finding some contentment with it and just accepting that this is someone who’s never going to change.
And this is someone who didn’t have her best priority in mind and someone who’d prioritize themselves over the love of their marriage.
There are two types of reactions to this album: One of them is the offline reaction. That is your sister and your sister-in-law texting you, “You have to listen to this album.” And then there is what happened on Al Gore’s internet.
What was the reaction online?
There were a couple different reactions online.
People were starting to look at it as a morality tale. You had this initial reaction that was listening to the album and vilifying David Harbour and all of this. You had people who were calling for boycotts of the last season of Stranger Things, people who said that he should never be working in a Marvel movie again, and people who were really equating personal, romantic problems with sort of illegal sins — making infidelity into something that should be punishable by a law or by firing, which is just not how we work as a society.
People were digging up things about their relationship, because it has that sort of car crash element to the album. People were looking at their shared Architectural Digest home tour of their Brooklyn Brownstone. People were analyzing the way that video started with David Harbour opening the door and kind of making a joke about the cameraperson being the other woman.
And then you also had people really digging into the sort of “West End Girl” of it all and looking at how David Harbour responded to Lily’s part in her first play. They also dug up an old Instagram story from Lily about flowers that he had sent her pre-opening night. He wrote on the note: “My ambitious wife, these are bad luck flowers because if you get reviewed well in this play, you will get all kinds of awards and I will be miserable. Signed, your loving husband.”
People were really able to take these things and feed into them because they were all public as it was, so it helps proliferate that narrative that Lily was already spinning.
Then there was another layer to that, which I find almost even more fascinating: People, as the album became more popular over its release weekend, were looking at it and then suddenly digging up things about not just David and Lily’s marriage, but Lily Allen herself. They dug up an old Twitter row that she had with Azealia Banks. They dug up confessions from Lily Allen saying that much of her last record, No Shame, was about her infidelity with her husband. So it’s kind of this idea that people are running to make the artist behind things in or to tear them down as much as possible.
Do people like this album because it’s a good album? Or do people like it because people love a trainwreck? Or do people like it because in 2025, it is saying something much deeper than what’s on the surface?
As a critic, I would have to say it’s a little bit of everything. It’s funny because it’s an interesting album. The music itself may not be the most unconventional or the most left-field in its production, but it is filled with earwormy hooks and interesting lyrics and fun phrases that kind of keep you coming back to it and really drill into your head, which is really part of the genius of making a breakup album like this. You want to keep returning to it no matter how sad it is.
And also I think people really do love the trainwreck of it, because there is a sort of rubbernecking sensationalism of: People love to look at a car crash. I think that people are really eager to tear people down in the public sphere when they seem to have any wrongdoing that they’ve done. And some people also like to dig in and uncover stuff and proliferate it online and on social media and add to the narrative themselves. So it all becomes kind of a bit of a game, but it all also works in Lily Allen’s favor too.
