In October 2025, singer-songwriter Lily Allen released her fifth studio album, West End Girl, to great critical acclaim and commercial success. When she announced an album tour, the first dates sold out in just 20 minutes.

Described by the Guardian as “a gobsmacking autopsy of marital betrayal”, West End Girl is a work of “autofiction”, inspired by Allen’s separation from Stranger Things actor David Harbour, his reported affair and the emotional aftermath.

The concept album documents a relationship and its breakdown from Allen’s perspective (or that of her creative “alter ego”). The singer told Vogue that West End Girl refers to things “I experienced within my marriage, but that’s not to say that it’s all gospel.” So far, Harbour has declined to comment or address the issue.

The title track takes us back to what appears to be the couple’s move to a New York brownstone, before the singer is offered the lead role in a London play (when, she reveals, her partner’s demeanour starts to change).

The reference to the brownstone recalls the couple’s 2023 Architectural Digest video (below) featuring their home. Listeners were quick to return to that video in the wake of the album’s release, retrospectively identifying red flags in the couple’s dynamic and what is said to be Harbour’s “toxic” banter. One commentator quipped: “Harbour really made a trailer for his own cheating scandal during the first 20 seconds.”

With Allen and Harbour both well-known figures, it is unsurprising that the revealing album has captured public attention. But this interest goes beyond celebrity gossip: the album has resonated with audiences for its raw contemplation of contemporary heterosexuality.

In track three, Sleepwalking, Allen asks: “Who said romance isn’t dead?” The album’s evocative storytelling skewers the distinctly unromantic experience of a “modern wife”, navigating the conventional dichotomy of women as madonna or whore while reluctantly attempting an open marriage.

While ethical non-monogamy emphasises consent and boundaries, the reported terms of the couple’s arrangement – to be discreet, only with strangers and involving payment – are broken with the now-infamous “Madeline”, a woman referred to in a song of the same name, who is not a stranger. Though the real identity of Madeline was later revealed in the media, Allen had said she was a fictional character.

Meanwhile, the track Dallas Major documents the singer’s re-entry into the world of online dating as a 40-year-old mum to teenage children. “I hate it here,” she states unequivocally.

Over it

Just five days after the release of West End Girl, social commentator Chanté Joseph published a piece in Vogue asking: “Is having a boyfriend embarrassing now?”. The article, which quickly went viral, describes a distancing from public declarations of coupledom in what Joseph calls an era of widespread heterofatalism. Just a few months earlier, an article in The New York Times Magazine used the same concept to bemoan “the trouble with wanting men”.

The term heterofatalism was coined by writer Asa Seresin (initially as heteropessimism) in 2019 to refer to “performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality, usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment or hopelessness about straight experience”.

In other words, heterosexual women are expressing dissatisfaction with the ways in which, despite longstanding feminist critiques, gender inequalities persist in romantic relationships. Such expressions might be performative, Seresin suggests, in that they do not lead to change but rather to resignation.

Reasons for disappointment are backed up by data. Research shows, for example, that women do more unpaid care work than men, resulting in time poverty. In the UK, the Office for National Statistics’ analysis of time use data shows that women do more than double the amount of cooking, childcare and housework than men. The COVID pandemic only deepened these existing inequalities.

Domestic abuse remains shockingly common, and disproportionately affects women. According to Refuge, one in four women in England and Wales will experience domestic abuse in their lifetime.

Meanwhile, the rise of the manosphere has seen a proliferation of online misogyny, with concerning implications for romantic relationships. Such platforms are directly referenced in the song 4chan Stan, where Allen invokes the anonymous online forum associated with a troubling incidence of hate speech.

Into this context, social media movements like #boysober have emerged, where women pledge themselves to “no dating apps, no dates, no exes, no hookups”. In South Korea, the 4b movement sees young women similarly rejecting marriage, childbirth, dating and sex – a sentiment taken up by some US women following the re-election of Donald Trump as president in 2024.

While distinctly contemporary in their communication, these sentiments also evoke older ideas – such as the political lesbianism once proposed by second-wave radical feminists. Like political lesbianism, the 4b movement has been critiqued for trans-exclusionary ideas.

Back in 2013, Allen released the single Hard Out Here. The song critiqued the objectification of women within modern pop culture, but the music video objectified women of colour women and was described by cultural critic Cate Young as “a brilliant example of everything wrong with the current climate of white feminism”. Allen apologised for the video in 2016.

Heterofatalism can be similarly limited in its response to gender inequality, failing to recognise intersectionality – the way that different aspects of someone’s experience and identity can overlap to exacerbate inequalities and discrimination.

Nonetheless, these expressions of dissatisfaction might challenge the assumed inevitability of heterosexuality and the gender inequality it all too often reproduces. West End Girl ends on a defiant note, refusing “shame” and recognising “it’s not me, it’s you”.

While the cheating husband might remain “stuck” in his “fruityloop” of heteronormativity and toxic masculinity, for the singer – and those with whom her story resonates – there may be other possibilities.

Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Kate McNicholas Smith, University of Westminster

Read more:

Kate McNicholas Smith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.