Facades of Righteousness

Britpop darling Lily Allen has a new album, and it’s recently become a viral sensation. If you’re like me, you may have listened to Lily Allen in the late ’00s and enjoyed her very British, very vulgar, and very honest music. It’s not the type of music you’d listen to with your mom or dad, and it’s not for the more sanctified among us. But, I really enjoyed it. I haven’t listened to Lily’s music much in the past fifteen years, and she wasn’t even on my radar anymore. Yet in October of this year, she released a new album titled West End Girl and it’s all I can listen to! It’s not family-friendly and it’s different from my usual musical taste of 2025, but I am entranced!

Part of the appeal is the music and craft of the album — it’s truly a work of art, just spectacular. But the other larger reason is I can’t stop listening is the lyrics!

Do you remember the line in The Office when Oscar says he loves a good quitting story? Well, same! And this album is an incredible story of how Allen’s marriage to David Harbour (from Stranger Things) came to call it quits. Though Allen is no saint herself, this tell-all album is juicy, scandalous, and salacious! She recounts the many ways she’s been hurt and lied to and felt scammed by her husband, David. Each song flows seamlessly into the next, weaving an opera-esque story that is a train wreck I simply can’t look away from.

One reason this album has become such a viral success is in part to a now infamous Architectural Digest video that Lily Allen and David Harbour took part in back in 2023 (above). After the release of West End Girl, many people have gone back to watch the thirteen-minute video; internet sleuths and vultures looking for clues as to what was actually happening behind the closed doors of this perfect-looking couple in their very curated and perfect home. While there are many hot takes on what was really going on in their Brooklyn brownstone, none have hit the mark so well as Leah McLaren on her Substack Juvenescence. McLaren writes:

I knew it in my body; the images made me feel queasy. There was something off about it. The house wasn’t right. … There was something frantic about its perfection. Human suffering radiated off the page, even in 2023 … The story of that house reveals something about all of us. […]

It’s the delusion that if we can just focus on the details, fuss and fuss and fuss, eventually we will make everything perfectly perfect and shiny on the outside and the inside will naturally follow suit. But human relationships don’t work like that.

Does that hit home (pardon the pun) for you? It certainly did for me. Before reading that article, I was just gawking at a celebrity online, but now it became a reminder of my own desire for the appearance of perfection, to make other people believe I have my crap together. I “fuss and fuss and fuss” hoping eventually everything will be perfect and shiny on the outside and that the inside will follow suit.

Lily Allen’s walls of perfection hid a great sorrow and irreparable brokenness. No matter how gorgeous the brownstone renovation is, it cannot fix its occupants. The religious word for this futility is hypocrisy, and Jesus’ description was characteristically vivid:

You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness. (Mt 23:27–28)

But this diagnosis is followed by a remedy: It’s not our outsides that count, or what’s inside. Instead of working on perfecting the outside, hoping the inside will follow, God gives grace and mercy from beyond the walls of our curated righteousness. This undeserved grace, freely given, brings life and light to the darkness and death inside us. The gospel is a remix of humanity’s natural inclination. This desire to hide our true ugly selves is a tale as old as time. Adam and Eve in the Garden hide themselves, both their naked bodies from each other and themselves from God. As Lily Allen’s marriage has a very public falling-out, she is choosing to continue controlling that narrative and releasing an album in which she is the victim and the heroine. When the facade of righteousness crumbles, we find comfort in feeling like we have agency in this matter, that we can control the narrative of what others know about us.

In the song inspired by John 14, Elvis sings:

In my Father’s house are many mansions. If it were not true He would have told me so. He has gone away to live in that bright city. He’s preparing me a mansion there, I know. Jesus died upon the cross to bear my sorrow. Freely died that souls like you might have new life.

Thank goodness that our salvation has nothing to do with any home built by the work of human hands. Jesus is the carpenter and the cornerstone of our ethereal mansions. We are not redeemed because of our work to build perfectly manicured and curated homes or lives. We are beloved because of Christ’s work on the cross, on our behalf. He freely died that souls like mine might have new life.

The home that David Harbour and Lily Allen shared was an interior-design smorgasbord, a perfect enough home for Architectural Digest to document. The relief of the gospel means that when our interior life is a smorgasbord of chaos and turmoil, God is with us. He opens the door of his own heavenly mansion to us and welcomes us in the most peculiar way: “Hello, Architectural Digest. Welcome to my home, it can be yours too.”