Lily Allen review – confessional pop on her own terms

Dome Tufnell Park, LondonThere’s fearlessness and a yearning to tell the truth as Allen debuts material from her forthcoming album No ShameNotable by its absence from the second of Lily Allen’s intimate comeback shows is any trace of the 32-year-old’s last album, from 2014. It’s not surprising: Sheezus bombed critically, sank commercially and, thanks to a video interpreted as racist and anti-feminist, became a lamb to the slaughter in the early days of Twitter’s wokeness wars. Nobody wants to go back there. To boot, the material she debuts from her forthcoming fourth album, No Shame, couldn’t be further from its predecessor’s hostile defensive posturing.Fans know to expect candour from Allen, who pioneered colloquial urban pop in the mid-2000s, and spends either an admirable or worrying amount of time explaining herself to trolls. There’s a sense of someone with a yearning to be understood. Covering the breakdown of her marriage, her depression, loneliness and fears about her children, Allen has apparently concluded on No Shame that the best way to show people they know nothing about her isn’t to satirise their preconceptions, but to tell her truth in unflattering, uncomfortable, accountable detail. Continue reading…
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