Tag: Lily Allen Miquita Oliver

In what is arguably the Pet Shop Boys’ most signature song, “West End Girls,” Neil Tennant commences with the verse, “Sometimes you’re better off dead/There’s a gun in your hand it’s pointing at your head.” Released in 1985 (at least the version most have come to know), the year Lily Allen was born, it applies only too well to the relationship scenario presented on Allen’s fifth album (and her first in seven years), called, what else, West End Girl. The title works on manifold levels. For a start, it is Allen defiantly declaring her return to London, even if only “emotionally,” after years spent in New York. A move that, as the title and intro track explains, was largely due to accommodating her ex-husband, David Harbour. As it would turn out, a move to the U.S. wasn’t to be the only way in which she would do her best to “accommodate.” For, as the album unfolds, Allen effectively confirms all the rumors about Harbour’s infidelity. Worse still, a kind of infidelity that was made to seem “legitimate” by way of him telling Allen, after their marriage, that he wanted an open relationship.

The signs of Allen’s dissatisfaction throughout the marriage were peppered throughout her podcast with Miquita Oliver, Miss Me? (on which Harbour served as a stand-in for Allen on two episodes while she went on a solo trip [also telling] in August of 2024). It was in little details, like mentioning that she was reading More: A Memoir of Open Marriage by Molly Roden Winter. Or that Harbour was off living in Atlanta, with their time spent mostly apart, or that she couldn’t meet some of Harbour’s more incongruous bedroom requests. The kind of requests, apparently, that he took to other women to fulfill. Even if, at the outset of the marriage, Harbour seemed determined to make it all as “fairy tale” as possible. This included, believe it or not their Las Vegas wedding on September 7, 2020, at a still-height of the pandemic (hence, Allen being pictured wearing a mask in certain photos). “Catered” by In-N-Out and officiated by an Elvis impersonator, Allen’s two daughters, Ethel and Marnie, were also in attendance, signaling how Harbour would be fully embracing his role as “stepdad.”

Alas, as “West End Girl” describes, in its ominous, slow-burn kind of way, that wouldn’t really turn out to be the case. Starting out with a sunny, la-di-da sound (courtesy of co-production from Allen, Alessandro Buccellati, Blue Ma, Kito, Seb Chew, Hayley Gene Penner, Leon Vynehall and Leroy Clampitt), Allen, in her usual “telling a story” manner, paints the picture, “And now we’re all here/We’ve moved to New York/We found a nice little rental/Near a sweet little school/Now I’m looking at houses/With four or five floors/And you found us a brownstone/Said, ‘You want it? It’s yours’/So we went ahead and we bought it.” Soon, however, the tone gets darker as Allen describes the underlying jealousy and lack of support from Harbour after she announced that she got the lead in a West End play. That would’ve been back in 2021 for her theater debut, 2:22 A Ghost Story.

The work offer seemed to come at an opportune moment for Allen, who makes it clear that her and Harbour’s wage disparity was just one of the many things that would make her uncomfortable, as elucidated by the lines, “I said, ‘I got some good news/I got the lead in a play’/That’s when your demeanor started to change/You said I’d have to audition/I said, ‘You’re deranged’ [a word that gets used a lot on this record]/And I thought/I thought that was quite strange.”

In other words, a very unsettling feeling started to descend upon Allen. One that perhaps made her wonder if she should have dated Harbour for longer than a year before marrying him. But, naturally, she tried to push her sense of unease aside, admitting, “So very strange/But I ignored it/Went ahead and I bought it [“buying it” referring to both “the image” Harbour was selling and their brownstone in Carroll Gardens].” She also went ahead and accepted the part in the play (later getting nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress and winning Best Actress at the WhatsOnStage Awards), telling it half in the present and past tense when she says, “Got a flight and I boarded/I’m on my way/Now I’m in London/I’m on my own/I’m in a hotel room/I’m on my own/And now I’m in London/And I’m all alone.” Thus, while the “high” of being a “West End Girl” should feel nice, the lingering low of it all is, ultimately, the similarity to her first marriage, which she discusses in her memoir, My Thoughts Exactly. And while the specifics are different, it still results in Allen being alone (and feeling lonely) in a hotel room by herself. Back in 2014, that translated to calling up female escorts to “keep her company”—yes, that means having sex with them.

Of course, the cuntier ilk might posit that perhaps Harbour is Allen’s “karma” for being the cheating cad in her first marriage to Sam Cooper (whose last name she keeps for all the writing credits on this album; so she’s “Lily Cooper” instead of Lily Allen, perhaps another subtle dig at Harbour). He being a modest “everyman” (that’s right, Allen married a “normal” before Lana Del Rey) who served as the one with the wage disparity in their marriage. Ergo, inspiring such No Shame lyrics (via “Apples”) as, “I felt like I was only good for writing the checks” and (via “Family Man”) “It’s not always easy/Being a family man [she being the ‘man’ in this iteration]/Baby, don’t leave me/I’m just doing what I can/To get by” and “I’ve come to the land of the free/I’ve let loose, I’m faithless/I am lost and shameless.” During her second marriage, Harbour would embody the traits conveyed in these lyrics.

Being that West End Girl unfurls like chapters in a book about a dissolving marriage, the title track concludes with a one-sided conversation (in that we can only hear Allen’s part of the dialogue) as Allen reenacts a FaceTime chat from when she was away working on 2:22. It goes, “Hi! How are you? I miss you. Yeah. Huh? Yeah.” Her tone grows increasingly distressed as she continues to reply, “Alright. Um… Okay. Well, I mean it doesn’t make me feel great. If that’s what you need to do, then… I guess. How will it work? Right. I mean it makes me really sad, but… Mhmm. Mhmm. No, I’m fine, I’m fine. I just, I want you to be happy. Okay. Okay, I’ll speak to you later. I love you. Bye.”

This leads seamlessly into the more up-tempo “Ruminating,” which finds Allen dissecting the nature of that call—the one in which Harbour sprung his true nature upon her, for it was no secret to anyone else that he was the type who “needed” to have sex with lots of different women. The more she thinks about it, the less okay she is with what went down, realizing that she only so readily agreed because of the initial shock of what he told her. But now that she’s “ruminating, ruminating, ruminating, ruminating,” as she repeats throughout the song, none of this is “gelling” for her. This much she makes even clearer when she sings, “Ruminating, ruminating/All the things you said/Why can’t you wait for me to come home?/This convеrsation’s too big for a phone call/Ruminating, ruminating/I’ve been up all night/Did you kiss her on thе lips and look into her eyes?/Did you have fun/Now that it’s done?/Baby, won’t you tell me that I’m still your number one?” But the most tragic addition to this question is Allen admitting that, even after everything, she wants to be his “number one” “‘cause you’re my number one.”

Sadness gives way to numbness on “Sleepwalking.” Though, of course, that numbness is infused with anger and depression, as she’s sure to mention in the verse, “Course I’m angry/Course I’m hurt/Looking back, it’s so absurd/Course I trusted you/And took you at your worst/Who said romance isn’t dead?/Been no romance since we wed/‘Why aren’t we fucking baby?’/Yeah, that’s what you said/But you let me think it was me in my head/And nothing to do with them girls in your bed.” This retelling is what lays out the conditions during which Harbour was able to “master manipulate” her, all leading Allen to realize, “You don’t stop talking and I’m just sleepwalking/See your thoughts forming/Baby, stop it, it’s three in the morning [in ‘Ruminating,’ it’s “four in the morning”—the point being that Allen can never again say ‘five o’clock in the morning’]/And I don’t know if you do it intentionally/Somehow you make it my fault.”

It’s during the bridge of “Sleepwalking” that Allen has her Charlotte York moment by telling him, “I know you’ve made me your Madonna/I wanna be your whore/Baby, it would be my honor/Please, sir, can I have some morе?/I could preserve all of your fantasies/If only you could act them all out with me.” Alas, Harbour simply would not do that, landing the marriage in a stalemate for, as Allen says, “You won’t love me/You won’t leave me.”

The melancholic tone of “Sleepwalking” then breaks into Allen’s signature sunny voice and musical timbre on “Tennis.” Possessing a sound that belies the rage beneath it, or as Allen described it to British Vogue, she makes “music [that] sounds really pretty and it’s not.” No, indeed. It instead shows all the ugliness just beneath the veneer of “civility.” And “Tennis” does an “everything’s just wonderful” job of conveying that as Allen recounts how “Daddy’s home/For the first time in weeks.” While she might be calling him that from the perspective of telling her kids about his return, there’s no denying Allen married him, in part, to once again try to fill the void where her own father failed her, later bringing it up on “Fruityloop” with the line, “I’m just a little girl/Looking for a daddy.”

Instead, she found the same kind of toxic father figure she was trying to substitute with a better, more wholesome one. The sort of man for whom she would want to make dinners and wait for by the door. Something she describes doing with, “Got the dinner on the table/Tell the kids it’s time to eat/And I made my baby’s favorite/But he didn’t seem to care/I just tell myself he’s jet-lagged/And I’m glad to have him here.” In many regards, the song echoes Taylor Swift’s “tolerate it,” during which she laments, “I wait by the door like I’m just a kid/Use my best colors for your portrait/Lay the table with the fancy shit/And watch you tolerate it/If it’s all in my head, tell me now/Tell me I’ve got it wrong somehow/I know my love should be celebrated/But you tolerate it.” Allen definitely seems to be experiencing the same phenomenon as she tries to welcome her ever-more (no Swift pun intended) distant husband back.

On a side note, Allen has repeatedly made her respect and “fanship” of Swift known on Miss Me?, and yet, Swift could never come up with the kind of truly unvarnished lines about a breakup that Allen does, particularly on this record. In point of fact, Swift ought to take some lessons from Allen on that front, especially after the atrocious lyrical offerings on The Life of a Showgirl. But then, in Swift’s “defense,” she should have known better to release an album when she was happy (for, as Allen herself told Perfect magazine, “I’m not really interested in listening to an album of somebody telling me how happy they are”).

In any case, things start to crumble quickly on “Tennis” (in the same devolving fashion that they do on “West End Girl”), with Allen continuing, “Then you showed me a photo/On Instagram/It was how you grabbed your phone back/Right out of my hands/So I read your texts/And now I regret it/I can’t get my head ‘round/How you’ve been playing tennis/If it was just sex/I wouldn’t be jealous/You won’t play with me/And who’s Madeline?” This being a question that Allen won’t rest on as the track continues. But before she keeps demanding to know who that is, Allen points out the injustice, “But you moved the goalposts/You’ve broken the rules/I tried to accommodate.”

Having mentioned “Madeline” more than a few times in “Tennis,” it’s only natural that the following song should be called, well, “Madeline.” The proverbial “Becky with the good hair” in Allen’s world—an ironic reference considering all the drama that surrounded Allen after she commented on Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter album on Miss Me? back in 2024. And, funnily enough, “Madeline” does have a certain country vibe to it, with a musical backing that channels a sweeping Western, with the hero(ine) blowing into town to save it from the nefarious harlot in question: Madeline. At one point, there’s ever a gunslingin’ shot fired in the background as Allen warns, “Lie to me, babe, and I’ll end you.”

Except, unlike Beyoncé, Allen confronts her Becky with a text of her own, commencing with, “I know this is none of your fault/Messaging you feels kind of assault-ive/Saw your texts, that’s how I found out/Tell me the truth and his motives/I can’t trust anything that/Comes out of his mouth.” And yet, talking to Madeline does little to soothe her either, especially not with that Valley Girl lilt of hers (something Allen is deft at imitating) as she assures, “I hate that you’re in so much pain right now I really don’t wanna be the cause of any upset. He told me you were aware this was going on and that he had your full consent. If he’s lying about that, then please let me know. Because I have my own feelings about dishonesty. Lies are not something that I want to get caught up in. You can reach out to me any time, by the way. If you need any more details or you just need to vent or anything. Love and light, Madeline.”

But there is no “love and light” for Allen, whose spiral about the many ways in which her husband broke their accords—accords she was strong-armed into in the first place—is at its most crystallized when she says, “We had an arrangement/Be discreet and don’t be blatant/And there had to be payment/It had to be with strangers/But you’re not a stranger, Madeline.” All these revelations hitting her at once is enough to make her want to “Relapse,” a track that serves as the next logical progression in this love tragedy.

Anyone who is aware of Allen’s history with drugs and alcohol is, of course, also aware of the herculean effort it took for her to get sober. And the perilousness of such sobriety when an emotional nadir arrives. Something Allen acknowledged to British Vogue when she remarked, “The feelings of despair that I was experiencing were so strong. The last time that I felt anything like that, drugs and alcohol were my way out, so it was excruciating to sit with those [feelings] and not use them.” Thus, yet another reason that “making art” seemed perhaps more important than ever. But before arriving to that conclusion, Allen instead thought, “The ground is gone beneath me/You pulled the safety net/I moved across an ocean/Fom my family, from my friends/The foundation is shattered/You’ve made such a fucking mess/I tried to be your modern wife/But the child in me protests.” As for mentioning trying to be a “modern wife,” Allen is of course referring to her openness to, well, having an open marriage. Even though she wasn’t informed of Harbour’s desires to have one prior to being led down the primrose path of not so holy matrimony.

So is it any wonder that the inner addict waiting to burst forth inside of Allen declares, “I need a drink/I need a Valium/You pushed me this far, and I just need to be numb/If I relapse/I know I stand to lose it all/Can you bring me back/When I’m climbing up the walls?” The saddest part of that question being that she’s still looking to her duplicitous husband to be her “rock,” even though he’s the one that caused her to disintegrate. A disintegration that reaches a new level on “Pussy Palace”—and no, Sabrina Carpenter’s “House Tour” has nothing on this: a tour of her husband’s second abode in the West Village. And one that finds her trying to drop off some of his things there (because she’s too pissed to allow him back into “their” bed), only to realize, “Something don’t feel right/I didn’t know it was your pussy palace/Pussy palace/Pussy palace/Pussy palace/I always thought it was a dojo/Dojo/Dojo/So am I looking at a sex addict?/Sex addict?/Sex addict?/Sex addict?” Made to feel like even more of a fool than she did before, the, er, blows keep coming when she notices the “Duane Reade bag with the handles tied/Sex toys, butt plugs, lube inside/Hundreds of Trojans, you’re so fucking broken/How’d I get caught up in your double life?”

Naturally, Allen is quick to assert that this isn’t “her” or “Harbour,” per se, on the album. That it can be read as a kind of “autofiction.” One that she created “in December 2024 and it was a way for me to process what was happening in my life.” She’s also certain to emphasize, “There are things that are on the record that I experienced within my marriage, but that’s not to say that it’s all gospel.” Even so, there are plenty who will take “4chan Stan,” this album’s edition of “URL Badman,” as just that. Throughout the song, Allen alludes to Harbour’s philandering ways continuing to escalate and, in accordance with that, so, too does her escalation of snooping—only to wish she hadn’t tried pulling back the curtain at all to see the truth. Or, in this case, opening the drawer to do it. For that’s how the song begins, with Allen once again telling a story when she recounts, “I went through your bedside drawer/You know I’ve never been inclined to do that before.” This echoing how her suspicions also prompted her to do something she never would have done before on “Tennis” when she talks about how it was the way he “grabbed [his] phone back” from her that made her read his texts.

The “kitchen sink drama” sort of backing track (in the style of something that both Pet Shop Boys and Soft Cell [RIP Dave Ball] would approve of) on “4chan Stan” only adds to the melodrama (on a related note, Allen reposted someone’s assessment of her record as Lorde’s Melodrama for divorced women). In addition to being yet another example of how Whitney Houston’s “It’s Not Right, But It’s Okay” is sort of a thematic through-line on this album. But particularly with “4stan Chan” and the revelations, “Never been Bergdorf’s/But you took someone shopping there in May ‘24/You bought her a handbag/It wasn’t cheap.” A verse that recalls Houston’s own appraisal of a receipt, “If six of y’all went out, ah/Then four of you were really cheap, yeah/‘Cause only two of you had dinner/I found your credit card receipt.”

To further complicate her husband’s infidelity, Allen speculates that the reason he won’t tell her the woman’s name is because she’s famous (“Why won’t you tell me what her name is?/This is outrageous/What, is she famous?”). And also because he hasn’t been honest with the other woman either, in terms of telling her that Allen was not “open” to this when she agreed to an open marriage (“I think you’re sinking/You’re protecting a lie/We don’t want her thinking/That you cheat on your wife”). So it is that Allen must finally appraise his cowardice as follows: “What a sad, sad man/It’s giving 4chan stan.” Of course, Allen would have probably preferred if Harbour did have difficulty finding women to fuck him (which is what Reddit’s 4chan heavily attacts: incels…and white supremacists). Even though she brands him as “not even cute” when she says, “You love all the power/But you’re not even cute.”

Alas, just look at someone like Kevin Federline, able to “snag” Britney Spears at the height of her own powers (and still haunting her as a result of that to this day). But then, it’s no secret that a man doesn’t need to be cute, just charming. Federline and Harbour have both proven that—and maybe it’s no coincidence that there was a time circa the It’s Not Me, It’s You Tour that Allen would cover Spears’ “Womanizer”—a track inspired by Federline’s own philandering behavior after Spears married him (though, in recent years, fans have speculated that the track is really about her father, Jamie, even though no songwriting credit is attributed to Britney).

Whoever it’s really about, Allen seemed to foreshadow her own second marriage by singing such lyrics as, “Superstar, where you from?/How’s it goin’?/I know you, got a clue what you’re doin’/You can play brand new to all the other chicks out here/But I know what you are, what you are, baby/Look at you, gettin’ more than just a re-up/Baby, you got all the puppets with their strings up/Fakin’ like a good one, but I call ‘em like I see ‘em/I know what you are, what you are, baby/Womanizer, woman-womanizer, you’re a womanizer/Oh, womanizer, oh, you’re a womanizer, baby.” And that is something Allen would now like everyone to know about Harbour, regardless of her calling it “autofiction” or not.

That much also shines through on the scathing “Nonmonogamummy” featuring Specialist Moss. It’s the latter’s presence on the track that helps Allen return to her ska/reggae/drum ‘n’ bass “roots,” the ones that were so prominent on Alright, Still. Coming right out the gate with, “I don’t want to fuck with anyone else/I know that’s all you wanna do/I’m so committed that I’d lose myself/‘Cause I don’t wanna lose you,” she establishes that a large reason behind why she put up with the behavior for so long was because she wanted the marriage to work out so badly. Almost at any cost.

Allen then delivers several coups de grâce aimed at Harbour when she hurls such casual “how could you?” instances as, “I changed my immigration status/For you to treat me like a stranger” and “A life with you looked good on paper/I’ve been trying to be open/I just want to meet your needs/And for some reason/I revert to people pleasing/I’ll be your nonmonogamummy.” Of course, everyone saw how Allen’s attempt at “people pleasing” turned out here. Though, obviously, if one wants to “see the silver lining,” that wreckage prompted lyrical spun gold for what would become West End Girl.

The upbeat sound and rhythm of “Nonmonogamummy” shifts to a downbeat “ballad,” of sorts, called “Just Enough.” A track that finds Allen exploring, among other things, her low self-esteem as it relates to her appearance. Which correlates to what happened in her marriage in that, as she mentioned to Perfect, “I don’t think that my previous relationship has helped me with [self-worth].” On “Just Enough,” it isn’t the first time Allen has alluded to feeling “old” on the record. On “Madeline,” she also pronounces, “I’ve gotten old, gotten ugly.” The same sentiment is parroted on “Just Enough” when she concedes, “Look at my reflection/I feel so drawn, so old/I booked myself a facelift/Wondering how long it might hold.” Indeed, Allen has talked about being more than okay with getting a facelift on Miss Me? and, yes, going as far as the consultation to see what it’s all about. This in addition to recently going “all the way” on paying good money for a tit job (which Allen has no shame—to use one of her album title’s phrases—discussing freely). And perhaps it can be assumed that Allen might have retained the services of a good lawyer after retaining the services of a good surgeon. You know, just in case Harbour is as nasty as he’s made to sound on the record and tries to come for Allen as a result of his own gaping insecurities. Ones that are paraded in such “Just Enough” lines as, “Why are we talking about vasectomies?/Did you get someone pregnant?” Despite these horrifying exchanges, Allen maintains, “You give me just enough/Hope to hold on to” before then adding, “Nothing.”

But a woman can hold on to hope no matter how nonexistent it is. Which is why she’ll resort to creating an alter ego on dating apps named “Dallas Major” in order to “comply” with her husband’s “need” for an open marriage. As track eleven on West End Girl, it ups the ante on Allen’s emotional journey (or rollercoaster), going from totally bereft and heartbroken to sardonic and “whatever” as she quips, “I’m almost nearly forty/I’m just shy of five-foot-two/I’m a mum to teenage children/Does that sound like fun to you?” Continuing to repeat, “I hate it here”—as in “on the apps” she’s been forced to resort to for the sake of playing along with “openness”—Allen further explains that’s why she goes by “Dallas Major/But that’s not really my name/You know I used to be quite famous/That was way back in the day/Yes, I’m here for validation/And I probably should explain/How my marriage has been opened/Since my husband went astray.” With her litany of self-deprecations, Allen switches to the third person at the end of the track, as if to indicate that she no longer “identifies with herself,” having dissociated, floated up above her body and decided to observe the shitshow from afar.

As for the line about being “here for validation,” she can admit such a craving applies to broadcasting the nitty-gritty details of her divorce (in a way that even Ariana Grande couldn’t on Eternal Sunshine) on what is now an immortal album. For British Vogue, Allen explained, “I want to feel validated. I want to feel like it’s okay to feel the things that I’m feeling and to be angry about the things that I’m angry about. I want someone to go, ‘Yeah, that is fucking confusing!’” For Perfect, she went into even more depth about how needing validation plays into making her personal life quite public in her music, stating, “I am excited about the possibility of [this album] helping me to move on. And I’m trying not to feel shame around that, because there is a part of me that feels guilt and shame that I have to be able to share things on such a grand scale in order to process them. Like there’s a grandiosity or almost a sociopathic element to that. But that’s what I do! I do it on my podcasts, I did it in my book. I had a childhood where I felt completely invisible and in my adult life, for whatever reason, I’ve decided to be incredibly visible. And I guess I am a ‘character’ in lots of ways. And I feel like the character can’t move on until everyone knows the story. Can’t move on to the next chapter.”

The next chapter after “Just Enough” is “Beg For Me” (in contrast to Charli XCX’s “Beg For You”), which details Allen’s insatiable desire to be loved in a way that Carrie Bradshaw would deem to be “ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can’t-live-without-each-other love.” Allen takes Bradshaw’s declaration to Aleksandr Petrovsky one step further by announcing, “I want to feel held/I want to be told I’m special and I’m unusual/I want your desire/I want to be spoiled/I want to be told I’m beautiful/Why won’t you beg, beg, beg for me?” Elsewhere in the song, a warped sample of Lumidee’s 2003 hit “Never Leave You (Uh Oooh, Uh Oooh)” takes hold (though, musically, there’s more than a slight hint of Juvenile’s “Back That Azz Up”): “If you want me to stay, love endlessly/If you want me to stay, I’ll never leave.” The earnestness of this technically “simple” desire—even if it’s one that a girl, let a lone a grown woman, is never supposed to admit—layers on the tristesse of the relationship failing so spectacularly.

But Allen is done being sad (or defeated) on “Let You W/In,” which features a sonic opening that recalls No Shame’s “Higher.” A song that, incidentally, also bears the mark of a scorned woman in such lyrics as, “Do me right/You’re lying/It’s in your eyes, don’t try it/No you can’t hide, have your lost your mind?/Did I cross your mind?” On “Let You W/In,” it seems Harbour’s answer to the latter question would be, “Not really,” with Allen accusing, “What is your sacrifice?/I’m protecting you from your secrets/Don’t tell the children, the truth would be brutal/Your reputation’s unstained.” Allen, needless to say, couldn’t let that lack of “staining” stand. And for Harbour to have believed that she wouldn’t write an album about what happened just goes to further show that he really didn’t know who he was tangoing with. And trifling with.

Moreover, when she kicks off the track with the line, “I’ve become invisible,” it automatically signals her worst fear realized, that abovementioned one about feeling as invisible as she did when she was a child. Hence, this ever-bubbling need to seek the spotlight again as a means of garnering more visibility instead of being “stuck here in my palace [not her ‘pussy palace,’ mind you]/I’m so fucking miserable/In my rabbit hole, yeah, I’m Alice/And I’m expected to be nice/Picking up the pieces.” Evidently, part of picking them up meant acknowledging that, in spite of her best efforts to put pop stardom to bed, the desire is still very much alive and well within her. In fact, her interviewer for Perfect, Alex Bilmes, got straight to that question at the very start of the feature, asking, “You haven’t released any new music in seven years. Was there a period where you thought you might permanently retire from pop stardom?” Allen replied, “Yeah, there was a lot of time where I felt like that.”

Concurring with Allen’s admission was none other than Miquita Oliver, who has continued to soldier on with Miss Me?, now with Jordan Stephens as her co-host. It was Stephens that she told on the October 23rd episode of the show, “[Lily] did not write music in her marriage… I didn’t think she’d ever make music again.” Both Stephens and Oliver then posited that, in this way, sometimes pain is the only motivator to make art. In point of fact, Allen exorcised the record from herself in a matter of sixteen days (as she told British Vogue, though Perfect was told ten; either way, it was fucking quick)—this after years spent saying she was working on new material. Evidently, all it took was an emotional evisceration to give her the final push she needed. To this end, she also stated to British Vogue that it’s true that all of her albums “have been informed by big traumatic experiences. My first album really was the break-up of my first love. And my second one was—this is going to sound so stupid—but the ‘Trauma of Fame.’”

Then there was the little-loved (on Allen’s part) Sheezus, which she characterizes as “a mess, because I was a pop star who suddenly had two children and didn’t fit into this world. So actually it’s kind of exactly what it should have been. Then my last album was emerging from the detritus of my first marriage… And we’ll see what happens with these songs!”

For Allen’s sake, hopefully what will happen is that she’ll get the validation she seeks from releasing them. Even if some, like the grand finale, “Fruityloop,” offer the kind of “parlance” that not “just any old” (or rather “any young”) listener can understand. Though everyone with even a cursory “Psych 101” knowledge can appreciate, “You’re just a little boy/Looking for his mummy/Things have gotten complicated/What with all the fame and money/Playing with his toys/He just wants attention/He can’t really do attachment/Scared he’s gonna be abandoned.” A fear that, ironically enough, also mirrors Allen’s. So it was that, while their wounds might have matched, their attachment styles certainly didn’t. And though Allen can also cop to being “just a little girl/Looking for a daddy, she still maintains (while self-referencing her own sophomore album title), “It’s not me, it’s you.”

In another moment, she channels her stark revelation from No Shame’s “Apples,” “Now I’m exactly where I didn’t want to be/I’m just like my mommy and daddy.” That is to say: divorced. On “Fruityloop,” she rephrases the “Apples” motif as, “Thought that we could break the cycle/Thought that I could keep you happy.” With the second divorce, however, she’s less inclined to shoulder the bulk of the blame, instead informing Harbour, “You’re stuck inside your fruity loop.” Further shrugging, “It is what is/You’re a mess/I’m a bitch/Wish I could fix all your shit/But all your shit’s yours to fix.” Or, as Tate McRae puts it on “Tit For Tat,” “Fix your fucking self.”

Even Allen is still trying to do that after years of talk therapy, now veering into EMDR as she keeps trying to “figure it all out” (hence, all the dabbling). Because, at a certain point during Miss Me?, Allen had stated that part of the reason she hesitated about releasing new music again was because 1) not enough people, for her, seemed to care about/react to the majesty of No Shame and 2) she needs and wants lots and lots of people to care (to fill the void of being cared for when it mattered most: during her childhood). One can only hope that, after punishing listeners with her absence for so long, they’ll finally start listening in droves. That maybe she’ll get the same kind of appreciation that Charli XCX suddenly did after Brat. And yes, XCX is just one of the many Allen acolytes, having cited her as a key influence on her own work (in turn, Allen has been an XCX fan to the point of incorporating some of the “brat’s” hallmarks—sped-up sound, vocoder, etc.—onto a track like “Relapse”).  

But fans and casual listeners alike shouldn’t automatically assume that Allen is back back with this record. Or that she would have the emotional wherewithal to tour it. Though she did make that assurance to Perfect, adding that she’s got some bills to pay, thus, some money to make. “And this is what I do to earn money.” In short, gets her heart broken/generally traumatized and then paid to write about it. So yeah, move over Taylor Swift. Because The Life of Slighted Girl is more compelling than that of a showgirl.