Today, the UK pop star Lily Allen announced that she will release her fifth studio album, West End Girl, this Friday, October 24 via BMG.

This will be her first project since 2018’s No Shame, marking the artist’s official return to music after taking a break to pursue acting and her lifestyle podcast Miss Me? with longtime friend Miquita Oliver. (Allen has since left her spot as regular host.)

The new album will focus on the strains — and ultimate fallout — of a marriage, based primarily on Allen’s marriage to Stanger Things actor David Harbour. “I made this record in December 2024, and it was a way for me to process what was happening in my life,” she commented, per Vogue on October 20. Recording West End Girl in a reported sixteen days, she says that the story of the album is “not gospel” to everything that happened in her marriage, but captures a lot of feelings of “confusion, sorrow, grief, helplessness,” as printed in Vogue.

Allen and Harbour married in 2020, settling in New York City, before divorcing in 2024. The album also addresses the artist’s reflections on moving to a new country, channeling feelings of separation from her friends, budding theater career, and life back in London, all while trying to ensure her two daughters (now teenagers) could go to school in the US but still stay close to their father and Allen’s first husband, Sam Cooper, according to Vogue.

The songs on the new LP were written primarily by Allen in collaboration with Blue May, and it was produced by Allen, Seb Chew, Kito, and Blue May. It features cover art and illustrations by Spanish artist Nieves González

Allen expands on the album:

"I'm nervous. 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. 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 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.......”

Not much else is known about the record, as Allen has kept most of it under wraps. With no singles or song snippets, what her new musical direction will sound like will be revealed at the end of this week.

West End Girl is out October 24. Pre-order here. Official tracklist:

1. West End Girl
2. Ruminating
3. Sleepwalking
4. Tennis
5. Madeline
6. Relapse
7. Pussy Palace
8. 4Chan Stan
9. Nonmonogamummy
10. Just Enough
11. Dallas Major
12. Beg For Me
13. Let You W/In
14. Fruityloop