Lily Allen opens the front door of the Georgian townhouse she’s calling home for the summer with a “Hiya” and a hug, and beckons me in, vape in hand. She’s in a well-worn marled gray Miu Miu polo, bottle-green pleated mini, black tights, and stompy platform boots, looking a little out of place, perhaps, in the cartoonishly quaint la-di-da-ness of Bath, where she’s living while she stars in Matthew Dunster’s Ibsen adaptation, Hedda, at the Theatre Royal. But actually, she tells me, leaning against the kitchen counter of her high-ceilinged Regency rental and flicking the kettle on to make us tea, her first husband’s father lived nearby, so she’s not so much a fish out of water. And anyway, “I do the same thing wherever I am,” she says, rustling in a plastic bag for a fresh Lost Mary (triple melon). “I’m just on my laptop, doomscrolling.” And to do that, she continues through a mouthful of pistachios, that signature Allen cynicism ratcheting up a notch, “It doesn’t matter where you are!”
Wait—a correction. She’s actually not been doomscrolling because she recently gave her assistant control of all of her social media passwords to ease her screen time. “This is how fucking deranged I am,” Allen says, sitting down at a large oak table, a sugary cuppa in front of each of us, the air heavy with the scent of several generously sized first-night bouquets positioned nearby. “[But] I can ask ChatGPT if a particular person has posted something. And it will say ‘Yes!’ And so last night I was like”—and here she starts barking in imitation of herself, like a sort of rabid animal—“‘You have to give me 15 minutes!!!’ Really, it’s deranged.” (As ever with Lily, it’s candor to the max. Later, she asks if I want to see her new boobs and doesn’t wait for a reply before lifting up her top to reveal the work of, it has to be said, a very talented surgeon. He must be getting a lot of referrals, I say. “Well, I don’t think he needs them because he did Kris Jenner’s face a couple of weeks after me.”)
Here she is, the Lily we love to love (yeah, sure, for some it’s still love to hate): funny, foul-mouthed, her wounds, old and new, open and ready for inspection. It will be 20 years next summer (I know, I know) since the 40-year-old first burst onto the scene, all tulle, trainers, and attitude, with her first single “Smile,” a song about a woman’s anger toward her ex. It set the tone for what would become her singular musical style—clever, ferociously honest lyrics hiding amid a sing-song London accent and sugary sweet melodies. It’s “music [that] sounds really pretty, and it’s not,” is how Allen sums herself up. It’s a sound that has—again, love or hate—made her a contemporary great, with more than four million albums sold, three Ivor Novellos, and a Brit Award to her name. Not bad for a career originally forged, lest we forget, on MySpace.
Along the way, she has become a mother—she shares Ethel, 13, and Marnie, 12, with her first husband, Sam Cooper, who runs a building firm—written a best-selling memoir; had a short-lived stint as a vintage boutique owner, immortalized by the accompanying documentary From Riches to Rags (look it up on YouTube immediately; you will not regret it); and co-designed a very well-reviewed sex toy (the Liberty, still on sale).
In recent years, she has made a successful move to theater, which has surprised no one more than her. (“There are moments where I’m like, ‘What am I fucking doing? I’m not an actress.’”) Her breakout role in the West End production of 2:22 A Ghost Story in 2021 marked the beginning of her working relationship with Dunster and earned her an Olivier nomination, which was followed by The Pillowman in 2023. And then there has been her wildly popular BBC Sounds podcast, Miss Me?, co-presented with her best friend, Miquita Oliver, until Allen’s departure as a regular host last month, which has become one of the corporation’s biggest audio hits.
Now, two transformative decades after her debut, she is making a return to music with the release of her fifth album, West End Girl, her first in seven years, on October 24. Recorded in a mere “16 days,” it is, quite possibly, Lily at the very peak of her powers: the gut-punch lyrics, now with added years on the clock, are set to infectious pop, and her pitch-perfect voice is at its most beautifully fragile. Frankly, it will eviscerate you.
So why now? “I made this record in December 2024, and it was a way for me to process what was happening in my life,” she says, choosing her words with the same care you might use to, say, pick up the shards of a broken wine glass. Because what was happening in her life at that time was that her marriage to actor David Harbour—star of Stranger Things and various Marvel movies, whom she had wed in Las Vegas in 2020 after meeting him on dating app Raya—was falling apart, amid reports of alleged infidelity on his part.
The album certainly appears to tell a story of a marriage coming spectacularly undone, of the all-consuming pain and confusion of betrayal. The upbeat title track acts as a sunny musical prelude of sorts, setting the scene of a newlywed couple embarking on married life in a Brooklyn brownstone (sounds awfully like the home she and Harbour showed Architectural Digest around in 2023, to internet-breaking effect). Already, though, there are warning signs (“You were pushing this forward / made me feel a bit awkward,” she sings). From there, the album unfolds like a tragic novel, each subsequent song a different chapter charting a relationship’s demise.
Take one of the album’s standout tracks, “Sleepwalking”: “You let me think it was me in my head / and nothing to do with them girls in your bed.” Or “Dallas Major”:“You know I used to be quite famous, that was way back in the day / I probably should explain how my marriage has been open since my husband went astray.”
Allen’s deadpan, fuck-you humor is alive and well: “What a sad, sad man, it’s giving 4chan stan,” she sings on “4chan.” Running through it all is a narrator desperately trying to understand what the hell happened to the life she thought she had. So here’s the question, then: is it her?
Allen sucks on her vape. “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,” she says, in the manner of someone who has recently spent an inordinate amount of money on lawyers’ fees. “It is inspired by what went on in the relationship.” What did she feel as she was making it? Cue more displacement activity as she applies a coat of lip balm and replies: “Confusion, sorrow, grief, helplessness.”
Harbour, too, is careful about what he says about their marriage. In conversation with GQ in April this year, he would say only that “There’s no use in that form of engaging [with tabloid news] because it’s all based on hysterical hyperbole.”
Between the end of last year and speaking to her now, Allen has been to “some very, very bleak places” emotionally. It wasn’t always thus—though she has long since scrubbed her Instagram clean of any Harbour-related content, scroll back far enough on his and you can find the blissful photos from their wedding day: her, beaming, in a 1960s-style Dior minidress, being held aloft outside the Graceland Wedding Chapel; the newly marrieds with her children having a celebratory In-N-Out burger.
Listeners of Miss Me? will know that at the start of 2025, she had to take time off for her spiraling mental health. She wasn’t sleeping, she wasn’t really eating. “I’ve had real problems with my food over the past few years,” she says, and in the thick of the break-up, “it got really, really, really bad.” Having been sober for six years, it was the closest she had come to relapsing. “The feelings of despair that I was experiencing were so strong,” she explains. “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.”
And so, for the first time in her life, she put herself into a residential facility. “I’ve been into those places before against my will, and I feel like that’s progress in itself,” she says of her self-awareness this time. “That’s strength. I knew that the things I was feeling were too extreme to be able to manage, and I was like, ‘I need some time away.’”
What was the sign that told her this was different?
She looks at me. “That I wanted to die,” she says simply, letting the words hang in the air. She breaks the silence with an almost embarrassed laugh, like a tic.
For now, she insists she is “really not in the same space that I was in when I wrote [these] songs. I have come a long way.” She got back into the “thick of recovery,” found a sponsor, and started going to daily meetings again. Meditation, therapy, and antidepressants have all helped. Yes, there are good and bad days, but, “I feel OK, actually,” she says, trying out the words to see how they feel. “Maybe the play has given me an outlet to express my rage.”
For anyone wondering, given the topline plot of Hedda—deeply unhappy woman trapped in loveless marriage—Allen agreed to star in the play almost two years ago, “before some things in my personal life started to mirror what happens in [it].” Is it a bit… on the nose? “It’s very on the nose,” she agrees. In rehearsals, they would take a break and she would “just go and fall apart.” Had the play not already been announced and tickets sold, it’s unlikely she would have gone ahead with it. Today, she says little about the status of her marriage, though she refers to Harbour as her “ex-husband.” Instead, she communicates her thoughts in tight grins and chilling, knowing laughs. The music is where and how she has tried “to make sense of it all.”
Thinking about it, all of her albums “have been informed by big traumatic experiences,” she says.
“My first album really was the breakup of my first love. And my second one was—this is going to sound so stupid—but the ‘Trauma of Fame.’” Her third, Sheezus, “was 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,” she says, laughing. “Then my last album was emerging from the detritus of my first marriage.” A beat. “And we’ll see what happens with these songs!” Cue wide eyes and rictus grin.
While most of us might turn to a friend or journal to unload, Allen has always offered up her most painful experiences for public consumption. The reason is simple: “I want to feel validated,” she shrugs. “I want to feel like it’s OK 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!’”
Yet it’s a key reason she has barely been out of the tabloids for the past 20 years. From day dot of her career, the attitude of first the red tops, now X et al, toward her has been: “‘We need to put this person back in a box. We cannot abide this stuff being said,’” she says. Meanwhile, her stance has always been, “‘No, I’m not having that.’ I watched my dad [actor and comedian Keith Allen] and all of my dad’s famous friends do exactly the same [things as me] and get nothing but praise.”
Why should she have behaved differently from them?
In 2025, Allen’s frankness is, largely, considered more superpower than shameful—as evidenced by the huge numbers downloading her podcast. (At the time of writing, she and Miquita are gleefully inviting listeners to send in any questions they have about blow jobs.) “When I went to Glastonbury [earlier this year], it was insane, the amount of women who came up to me [to tell me], ‘Your podcast has saved me; it gets me through my week; me and my friends have a WhatsApp group about it.’ I think we’re so disconnected in our connectedness that it’s a relief when you hear something real.”
Nevertheless, the tabloids’ obsession with her remains. It is, I suggest, the most enduring relationship of her life—it is certainly the most toxic (which is saying something).
Take the time, aged 24, when she had to personally email an editor, begging him not to publish a fictitious story that she was pregnant. Or when she gave birth to Ethel in 2011, a year after her first son, George, was stillborn—a life-changing experience told in extraordinarily emotional detail in her memoir—and was still in the delivery room when a tabloid called for confirmation of the baby’s arrival. Or the “outraged” opinion pieces that were published just a few days before we meet, about Allen’s revelation that she couldn’t recall the number of abortions she’d had.
Does the negative attention ever get any easier to handle? “No,” she says, the silent “duh” in her voice almost audible. But at least it’s not as “physically oppressive” as it was. “When I was 19, I would wake up and there would be 20 guys on my doorstep with long-lens cameras, and they would follow me all day long.” It was a “prison” from which drugs and alcohol became her means of “escape.” It is striking that her friends and peers who were treated similarly by the press and paparazzi—Peaches Geldof, Amy Winehouse, Caroline Flack—are “all gone,” she says, finishing my sentence for me. “They’re all gone.”
“I sometimes feel like, oh God, another drama,” she continues, rolling her eyes at herself, almost embarrassed by the events that have shaped her public persona. “No one wants to know about your fucking traumas.”
She is acutely aware of how they are perceived. “[People say] ‘She’s so privileged, blah, blah, blah.’ And it’s like, yeah, I’m aware of all of the things that are brilliant about my life, but that doesn’t mean that when bad things happen I don’t feel them. Just because you have a version of me in your head that is well put together and carries a nice handbag, doesn’t mean that I don’t still feel pain.”
Lately, managers have started asking Allen to mentor young pop stars who are struggling to process the newfound weirdness of their lives. “I don’t know why, maybe it’s because I’m one of the only surviving ones?” she says, bemused. And what’s her advice? “Get someone else to look after your socials.” Also: “When people come up to you in the street and you’re not working and they ask you for a photo, ask them to name five songs,” she says. “If they can do it, then you can give them a picture. Otherwise you’re being used.”
Is it harder to be famous now than it was when she was starting out? “I probably care more about my appearance now than I did when I was being plastered all over the tabloids every day.” Back then, “I was almost defiant in my not wearing makeup and just being myself. I wish I was more like that now.”
Now Allen faces a quandary: stay in New York, where there is “nothing” for her apart from her friends in recovery and, crucially, “anonymity,” or return to London, where she feels she is always “subconsciously or consciously, fighting against ‘tabloid Lily’,” where every time she walks into a room, “I feel like I have to overcompensate to prove that I’m not that person that they read about and that is exhausting. It really is exhausting.”
That said, this past summer has also “reminded me of the fact I have a life” in London, she says. The city welcomed her back with open arms—from the Serpentine’s A-list summer soirée (where she was a standout in feathery 16Arlington), to partying at Charli XCX’s east London show—Allen was on the guest list of every party anyone wanted to be at.
For those of you waiting with your knives out: her daughters spent the summer at camp in Massachusetts “making friendship bracelets.” But when they’re not at camp, is co-parenting straightforward, I ask? “With which husband?” She shoots back. Well, both? Or the one that’s their father? Or is Harbour going to continue being their stepfather…
“You’ll have to ask him,” Allen says. “Me and Sam, we’ve got a good relationship—I wouldn’t say that it’s a friendship, although we are friendly. His dad died earlier this year and we spoke a lot on the phone around then because I loved his dad and we share children together. So obviously we’ve been talking a lot about what we’ve been experiencing as a family over the past year and he’s had concerns, and yeah, we co-parent.”
I wonder if being a mother to now-teenage daughters has altered her outlook at all. Does she worry about them out there in the world?
“I try not to smother them,” she says. “I feel like I can try and shield them and protect them from things, but I don’t think that really works. A big part of what I’m doing at the moment creatively is for them. I need to show them that, yeah, we’ve been through something fucking devastating—twice now—and that I can get us through. They’ve seen me in the depths of despair this last year and they have listened to my music and they are proud, I think.” (They don’t really understand the lyrical content, she says, “But their TikTok dance is ready!”)
“I feel like I often talk on the podcast about how fucking hard it is to be a mum,” she continues. “And people come to me and say, [she puts on a grouchy voice] ‘Imagine your children reading this.’ And it’s like, yes, I want them to know that so that they don’t do the same thing! You know? I felt totally gaslit by my mum about motherhood.” How so? “Well, she was like, ‘Oh, it’s easy, just throw it over your shoulder and everything’s fine.’”
And what about her personal life now? “Are you on the apps or are you in a relationship?” she fires back to me. “Because when you get to 40, you go into a different category and your selection is suddenly very different,” she says, her voice becoming a squeak.
But this is moot: dating is not a priority until she has worked some things out. “Listen, I am in a period of self-discovery at the moment and I’m really trying to explore how I’ve got myself into certain situations in the past,” she says. “I need to unpack some things and break some patterns and probably talk to my therapist about my relationship with my dad.” You haven’t done that yet? I balk. “I think we have some more work to do.”
By all accounts, it is hell out there in the world of modern love and dating. What exactly, in her opinion, has happened to men? “I think the internet happened. And I think the abundance of opportunity that the internet has created and the ease with which things and people are available is what happened.”
With a bit of distance, some rage has subsided. Looking back on her second marriage, she is able to say that “there were lots of good things” about it. “My kids had an amazing experience living in America for five years, and I have a lot of compassion for my ex-husband. I think we all suffer.”
And with that, it is almost time for Allen to get to the theater, to transform into her role as a “convincingly brittle newlywed” as The Guardian will praise her performance come opening night.
But she is more excited to step back into the role she was born to play: musician. “When I feel like I’ve captured something well and it does something for me, but can also do something for others, I want to play it to people straight away,” she says. “It’s all I want to listen to.”
However difficult the road to making this record has been, she is thankful this is what has come out of it. Finally, she has something that is truly, authentically, her. “It feels like me, unquestionably,” she says, proudly. “It feels like my voice. I listen to it and I go, ‘Yeah, that’s me.’”
In this story: hair, Neil Moodie; makeup, Gina Kane. Nails: Michelle Humphrey. Set design: Harry Stayt. Production: Amelia Studios.