The Pop Corporation

Never mind the podcasts and tabloid stuff – we’re a music blog and we’re focusing on that, thank you very much. And the news is that Lily Allen has announced that she’s releasing a new album after some years away from the scene.

The new record will be her fifth and called ‘West End Girl’ and will be released this week – Friday 24th October.

When Lily is at her best, she makes the kind of music that incorporates the whole of London – from the reggae from the barrow boys, to MPC beats and retro pop. Think about how much ‘Smile’ leans on its surroundings. And then there’s ‘The Fear’ which is almost Albarn-esque synthpop – it’s all very nice.

Well, we don’t know what this new one will sound like but we’ve seen some titles, and ‘Relapse’ and ‘Nonmonogamummy’ stand out. There’s 14 songs in all, and in a statement, she goes into a bit more detail.

She says: “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.”

The ‘new city’ shew refers to is presumably related to her time in New York, so maybe we should expect a little less of the Bow Bells, and a bit more of the Big Apple hustle.

We’ll have to see.