While the internet applies its forensic techniques to autopsy this relationship, West End Girl has the harrowing feel of a victim-impact statement. Recorded in 16 days, its 14 tracks roughly correspond to an arc that spans from realization to emancipation. It is a mixture of public and private, fact and fiction that exists both to chum the waters and reveal behind-the-scenes context. Allen’s divorce was publicly announced in February; though some would have taken longer to reflect, her storytelling benefits from the particularity and immediacy. After struggling on previous records with uninspired beats and unwieldy targets, West End Girl is a return to form that gathers every ugly detail into a reminder of Allen’s force as a writer.
Despite unavoidable comparisons to Lemonade or 30, West End Girl is much leaner and more brutal. Unlike those records, Allen’s album is too concerned with honoring moment-to-moment feelings of hurt and betrayal to really reach for a mature overview of the breakup. But what the songwriting lacks in conceptual development, it makes up for in raw emotion and narrative thrust. Allen’s truth bears out in a blow-by-blow account of coming to grips with a partner’s infidelity and gathering the resolve to leave for good. “Never get your sympathy/I don’t think you’re able,” she sings on “Let You W/In,” “But I can walk out with my dignity/If I lay my truth on the table.” There are plenty of pop songs about love as a drug, but I don’t think I’d ever heard one about heartbreak as a threat to sobriety until “Relapse.” Going through the motions of an unwanted open relationship would be painful enough, but throwing motherhood into the mix on “Nonmonogamummy” and “Dallas Major” is simply excruciating.
The record is a relief map of broken boundaries and abandoned commitments and Allen colors it in hellacious, knife-twisting detail. On “Pussy Palace,” she reveals that Bluebeard’s dungeon is actually a West Village bachelor pad stocked with sex toys, butt plugs, and lube. The perfectly paced reveal of “Madeline” (“But you’re not a stranger, Madeline”) is stomach-churning in its implication, even as it veers into cringe comedy with a cameo by an actress doing an unsettling Allison Williams impersonation. One of the truest West End moments occurs in “Sleepwalking,” when Allen tries desperately to re-kindle the spark with one of the funniest inversions of Oliver! put to record: “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?” Occasionally she strains to sell the horror. “4chan Stan” has an edgy title but a faulty premise: No one who spent extended time there has ever been worth losing sleep over. That song also suggests Allen went to the Whitney Houston school of amateur sleuthing: “Never been in Bergdorf’s/But you took someone shopping there in May ’24.”
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