By Jack Cullen
The plushy princess turned Grime Mum takes a hard look in her dusty compact mirror and delivers her best album yet.
Somewhere between Mighty Hoopla ending and the World Cup starting, Lily Allen dropped a new album. If you’re under twenty-five you might not care. Lily is for old millennials like me who enjoy a drink: post quarter-life crisis, ex-private school kidults who – when they’re not shitfaced – push around in media. She’s also popular with bougie Corbynista disco mums and soy latte rude boys. I tick two and a half of these boxes and I’m a big Lilz fan.
Her last album ‘Sheezus’ was hands down FAB, and how sad to see the press all copying each other in saying otherwise. Just beyond the radio singles Hard Out Here and Air Balloon, which didn’t interest me too much, lay the super fresh L8 CMMR, total banger URL Badman, with its classic Lily witticisms (“I don’t like you. I think you’re worthless. I wrote a long piece about it, up on my WordPress”), and the stunning ballad Our Time, the video for which is a modern masterpiece in the genre (Lily’s always been a gifted actress, it’s a shame she isn’t in more).
The only skip tracks on ‘Sheezus’ for me were the twee barnyardy ones about that idyllic marriage of hers to plumber Simon Cooper. A marriage which is now a fuzzy wreckage and forms the sombre ribcage of ‘No Shame’.
Whereas ‘Sheezus’ bore a dolled-up flashy LA mansion Lily, a parody of noughties excess and nouveau riche naffness, ‘No Shame’’s cover gives us glitchy lo-fi 90s Lily. She’s always on trend, if not ahead of it, and – as I type this – Madonna is most likely rolling around on the floor of a property guardianship in Muswell Hill with a throwaway camera, scuffing her trainers up with brillo pads.
‘No Shame’ opens well with Come On Then, a cool, modern, to-the-minute affair, mixing Razhel-style beatboxing laps with a fast, trippy beat as if Lily were accidentally leaning against her gas hob’s ignition clicker. “I’m a bad mother, I’m a bad wife, you saw it on the socials, you read it online” she chimes, welcoming us into her most personal album yet.
Trigger Bang is up next with British rapper Giggs and it’s a standout track, bringing together a wonderful Lily combo – the musicality of her stagey youth, her active interest in subcultures, her gift for comic timing and her innate, thoroughbred sense of celebrity. With under two million YouTube views in six months though, she’s somehow off target.
I love the nostalgic, plushy, post-rave video, but record label bosses are at a different party it would seem. The chorus “Everyone’s a trigger, bang – bang, bang, bang, bang”, samples a gun but stops shorts of what it itches to do – which is rip off Paper Planes. It’s reminiscent of Lupe Fiasco’s Superstar, and of course close friend Mark Ronson’s Bang, Bang, Bang – summer singles you bopped to for a bit, before they found their resting place on Monsoon and Jigsaw in-store playlists.
It’s a pity Lily burnt her bridge with Diplo (who produced Paper Planes) because ‘No Shame’ is one producer short of topping the charts. She sacked off longtime collaborator and expert scorer Greg Kirstin for this record and without his splash of milky genius in her tea, Lily’s left sounding a bit stark and herbal. That’s not to say Lily’s new friends don’t bring presents to the party. Burna Boy on Your Choice is a highlight, although gone is the vivacity and panache with which Lily once upon a tyyyyyme liked to banter in the studio with the likes of Dizzee Rascal.
Another interesting track is Three, sang from the point of view of Lily’s toddler (although why a three year old would choose a pop sound that sounds like She’s The One by Robbie Williams is anyone’s guess, wouldn’t Lily’s three-year-old prefer to be produced by SOPHIE?) Weirdly, I sense the shadow of Robbie Williams leaning over Family Man too, with the forced-arm defiance of No Regrets.
Lily has taken this album to press suggesting that it’s her slowing-down album, her getting to grips with reality album. Death’s scythe has started sliding into shot on selfie mode, the highs are less frequent but the kids are always there. Pulling rappers and pulling all-nighters have taken their toll. Lily’s Grime Mum image makes her seem older than her years. She’s a wee thirty-three, and in the post-truth era, age is what you want it to be. Britney is partying in France, Kylie is bloody fifty and embarking on another world tour, meanwhile Tom Daley is twenty-three, checking his Deliveroo, waiting for a baby to arrive. Sounds like a choice?
‘No Shame’, lyrically, is a slow, painful unpicking of society’s tall orders – marriage, monogamy, Murdoch – dirty plates left on the table by previous generations and yet to be cleared away, while Lily herself longs for a more modern matriarchy that somehow marries motherhood with hedonism.
If she was ‘woke’ on Sheezus, she’s more ‘toke’ on ‘No Shame’. Introspective, tender but riddled with anxiety. Lost My Mind is a haunting track, “Now I’m stuck in a rut, looking at my phone all night” she sings, while a melody that conjures wedding morning butterflies chaperones Lily around with a cheery, fateful clockwork motion. It’s creepily catchy and better than its video.
Waste, like several other tracks is a very Lily sitting room bopper. Lily’s take on dance has never been clubby, there’s always a potato salad nearby, but ‘No Shame’ is an even more intimate party than usual. It’s the morning after, taking us into the deep unlaundered recesses of a Primrose Hill mansion – Less Trigger Bang, more Tiger Balm – with Lily propped up, bleary eyed, singing into her dusty, trusty compact mirror, while reggae beats waft upstairs.
Lily is a poet who, with the help of her good looks and the craft of other people, packages her poems into a format that satisfies her public school drive. Catchy songs with nice videos, headline-fertile TV ops and lucrative festival gigs. These assets enhance her power as a poet and it’s perversely satisfying to see just how much the Daily Mail can’t stand her.
‘No Shame’, unlike Lily, won’t compete for your attention, but it is perhaps her best album yet. A reflective, nightbus companion of a record with a gorgeous, muted party pulse and hidden powers.
No Shame is out now. Follow Jack Cullen on Twitter @jackcullenuk
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