Lily Allen is set to make her long-awaited musical return with her first album in seven years, West End Girl, dropping this Friday, October 24, per music-news.com.
The “Smile” hitmaker, 40, has signed a deal with record label BMG and confessed she is “nervous” as the collection is her most “vulnerable” to date, with raw tracks penned in a mere 10 days.
“I’m nervous,” the singer admitted in a statement. “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.”
Those formative life events include the highly publicised breakdown of her marriage to Stranger Things actor David Harbour, 50.
Allen continued, explaining the album’s complex themes: “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… In that respect I think it’s very much an album about the complexities of relationships and how we all navigate them.”
West End Girl will be the pop star’s fifth studio album, following 2018’s No Shame. Allen’s successful career has seen her release four albums between 2006 and 2018, spawning huge hits including ‘Smile,’ ‘The Fear,’ ‘Not Fair,’ and ‘LDN.’
The artiste had previously opened up about finding solace in making new music following heartbreak. Speaking on her Miss Me? podcast, Allen described the therapeutic nature of her process.
“Music is the one place where I can let it all go. It’s almost like therapy,” she shared. “My producer or my co-writers become almost like therapists because I’m processing the things that I’m going through in real time… I can do that in music, but I can’t really do it when I’m talking to friends or my parents. But I can do it in a three-and-a-half minute pop song.”
