Lily Allen - No Shame

The Quietus

Revisiting the pains of divorce, bad friends, addiction and loneliness, the confrontational goading of Allen’s early Smile-era music remains, but on No Shame it is shrouded in the spectres of adulthood: fatigue, responsibility and retrospection.

On this album Lily rips her skin off and shows us all the goo inside. Album highlight ‘On Everything To Feel Something’ deploys delicate piano arpeggios and sugary-sweet falsettos to cushion an upsetting story of a joyless one nightstand. “All I need is someone to walk all over me / Close the door behind you, please,” Allen sings as her voice distorts into autotune, as though her body was turning cold and machinic from the encounter.

Throughout the album, Allen’s lyrics remain devastatingly frank. As if communally scrolling through her text messages, we learn of impotent partnerships and maternal shame: “Towards the end we were not even having sex,” she sings of ex-husband Sam Cooper on ‘Apples’. “I felt like I was only good for writing the cheques.” On ‘Three’, a song written from the perspective of her toddler, Lily speaks with the naive candour that only a child could manage: “This afternoon I made a papier-mâché fish, Mum / I made it just for you / Please don’t go, stay here with me.” The album’s confessional quality is well-suited to an audience who thirst for the intimate dealings of private lives.

Rather than over-dramatise the already cutting subject matter with wailing harmonies, on No Shame Lily stays true to her spoken-word delivery; she sounds almost bored. As the album nears an end it becomes more upbeat, ska-influenced ‘Waste’ featuring Lady Chann is full of cheeky retorts and ‘Cake’ is a sunny R&B tune reminiscent of packed-out grassy parks, but there lies a queasy sickness underneath: "There's some light / Think you need it / You look so god-damn defeated / Why'd you feel so cheated?”

No Shame might sound more mellow than her earlier razor-sharp sass, but beneath the surface lies a gloom, one I’m glad Lily lets us see.

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The Guardian 80

The singer’s broken marriage is laid bare in an album that offers spikiness, regret and vulnerability via uniformly first-rate pop

It’s hard not to heave a weary sigh as Lily Allen’s fourth album gets under way. From the title down, No Shame has been trumpeted as a ballsy return to form following 2014’s Sheezus – and yet the opening track, Come on Then, sounds remarkably like something off that album. A relative of Wind Your Neck In or URL Badman without the latter’s acerbic wit, it’s a prickly, defensive whinge about “the socials”, their cyclical relationship with the tattle mags and tabloids and Allen’s depiction therein.

Of course, Allen has plenty to feel prickly about – growing up in public, she’s been given the kind of hard time that Twitter’s grimmer corners and sidebar-of-shame authors seem to reserve exclusively for young women who make their voices heard. Nevertheless, as she demands to know why what’s written about her is “so far from the truth”, it’s hard to assuage the feeling that you’ve heard this all before, and not just from her. Modern pop is already waist-deep in songs bemoaning haters, deceitful journalists and the disparity between public perception and reality. It’s the equivalent of 70s rock stars complaining that life on the road was lonely and tedious: a complaint about a downside of stardom that’s been repeated to the point of cliche.

Pitchfork 63

Pilloried in the press for her every misfortune, Lily Allen scrutinizes her public persona on an album that dilutes staggering sincerity with uninspired beats.

The Guardian 60

(Regal/Parlophone)

It’s not easy to bounce back from a critical drubbing like that Lily Allen took for her 2014 album Sheezus, whose bullish stance failed to convince most. Having publicly disowned that “identity crisis”, her fourth record is a radical overhaul – saying goodbye to longtime producer Greg Kurstin – that gives her signature dancehall-flavoured pop a lighter, fresher, more streamlined sheen, Allen’s voice feather-light.

It’s a wise move for songs well suited to an era of heavy, tell-all memoir. Opener Come on Then belies its pugnacious title with the revelation that “every night I’m crying”, while Family Man, a drama-laden piano ballad, addresses her marriage breakup and her guilt at taking time to tour and write, a worry also addressed on Three, written from the point of view of a confused child. The hardest hit, though, is Everything to Feel Something, self-loathing sublimated into a sweetly ethereal numbness. There are nagging hooks among all the airy confection and revelations, too, yet the relentless inward focus gets exhausting over 14 tracks that should have probably been 11. The closer, Cake, a dreamy, summery R&B number, lets a little light in, urging listeners to both have and eat, to grab a bit of “that patriarchy pie”. Though No Shame ultimately feels more like a transition than a reinvention, it’s good to see Allen coming back for seconds.