Lily Allen – Pussy Palace

You certainly won’t be hearing this in the Duane Reade aisles this holiday season…

[Video]
[6.88]

Tim de Reuse: Here, as on the whole of West End Girl, Allen infuses this song with two goals: first, to be a catchy, endlessly earwormable pop hit and second, to obliterate David Harbour. These goals are occasionally in phase: the line “I didn’t know it was your pussy palace” is a perfectly serviceable hook while also sharp with icy judgment. These goals also occasionally interfere with one another: her commitment to dull, autotuned vocals, nursery-school rhymes, and total rejection of metaphor make the reality of her situation uncomfortably vivid to even the most tuned-out listener while leaving very little for the ear to latch onto during the verses. The only time she editorializes hard enough that you hear a spark of emotion is when she just-above-a-mumbles out “Hundreds of Trojans, you’re so fucking broken.” It’s incisive and arresting and kind of brutal, and yet simultaneously kind of dull.
[7]

Alfred Soto: I’ll confess to knowing not a thing about Lily Allen’s private life nor how it may or may not enliven West End Girl‘s already quite perky tunes. Thanks to its two-fingered synth backdrop “Pussy Palace” has a more hummable chorus than I expected, reliant on Allen’s resignation and her embers of anger. She enunciates “Duane Reade” like a chronic Amazon Prime shopper — now there’s anger.
[7]

Katherine St. Asaph: So much about this is wrong:
1) The NLE Choppa-esque rebranding of pied-a-terre as pussy palace (Urban Dictionary informs me its antonym is “dick dungeon,” which also would have worked here)
2) The repeated, autofictionally hyperspecific insistence that she always thought her ex’s pussy palace was a dojo — the year’s second pop-cultural artifact, alongside One Battle After Another, with a dojo that’s a front for clandestine activities
3) The fact that there’s a pre-existing walkthrough video by Architectural Digest revealing it to be less Pussy Palace than Pussy Pinterest (perhaps because, in his words: “I don’t want you to think I’m a big candelabra bathtub type of guy”)
4) SOMEONE FUCKING DIED THERE (this one is just horrifying, no jokes; the reality makes this single actually tactful by comparison)
5) The borrowing of the chorus structure from P!nk’s “Funhouse,” prompting people like me to mentally mash them up: “This used to be a pussy palace, but now it’s full of evil clowns!”
6) Lily’s ex apparently keeping a shoebox full of heartbroken letters from multiple women, like he’s the Ea-Nasir of cheating
7) The implication that either Duane Reade sells butt plugs now, or that at some point he transferred them to a separate bag, then tied the handles to hide them (I guess?) rather than stashing them in, I don’t know, a drawer, a pussy cubby, maybe a pussy ottoman
8) The sheer contrast between the sordidness of it all, and the mildly pleasant pop song attached.
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: Bless Lily Allen in all her troubles. I bet you David Harbour listened to this very album and laughed it off — or worse, was like, “so true.” 
[7]

Ian Mathers: I imagine others who have not been keeping up with celebrity news or whatever were also slightly surprised to have the word “dojo” pop up in the chorus like a stepped-on rake to the face. Even more surprising is that over the course of even a single listen, Allen manages to give its juxtaposition with the titular “Pussy Palace” some real bathos. I am guessing the rest of the record has a lot of the plainspoken, straightforward depictions of a bad relationship found in the verses, and to be honest what’s here might be enough for me, but the chorus and the production completely work. If only it was a dojo, damn.
[8]

Julian Axelrod: West End Girl isn’t an soap opera or domestic drama, but a horror thriller where a creeping sense of dread gnaws at our heroine until the sick truth is revealed. In this context, “Pussy Palace” is essentially the scene from Se7en where the detectives enter the first victim’s apartment, but with force feeding and spaghetti cans swapped out for butt plugs and Trojans. (Side note: Why don’t more songs mention lube? Is every pop star just having the most uncomfortable sex imaginable?) The tabloid subject matter might be new to Lily Allen, but she’s always been skilled at shining light on the ugliest corners of love and fame, and it’s exhilarating to hear her write through these emotions in real time. Nearly 20 years after “Smile,” there’s still nobody better at making you shake ass while your stomach churns.
[8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: An exquisite podcast.
[5]

Claire Davidson: One of the more haunting celebrity quotes I’ve encountered recently is Lily Allen’s assertion that having kids “totally ruined” her career as a pop singer. The remark was half-joking, and preceded by the assurance that, of course, she genuinely does love her children, but the severity of her wording suggests a very real hurt on her part—when she made these comments in 2024, it had been nearly six years since she’d released a studio album. Fast-forward to October 2025, though, and Allen is back in the news with West End Girl, an album that was clearly made more out of necessity than ambitions to launch a career revival. Recorded in only 16 days, the project spares no lurid details in depicting the implosion of her marriage to actor David Harbour, and “Pussy Palace” represents the culmination of this drama. The track finds Allen in media res, having come to terms with the reality of her impending breakup, ready to drop her ex’s things off at his place without ever seeing him again. When she arrives at his apartment, though, she’s shocked to find evidence of a sex life that suggests hundreds of potential partners, a violation of their open relationship’s terms. The track mirrors that fog of stunned bewilderment, as Allen’s gauzily multitracked falsetto arches against programmed strings and wispy keyboard flutters, and the irony of pairing such a delicate arrangement with such salacious lyrics is part of the point: an example of the mordant humor that only makes the gut-punch of Allen’s realization more stark. As a song, “Pussy Palace” lacks a bit of finesse: Allen’s shambling rap verses don’t pair well with the track’s moodier synth-bass, and the entire song has a grainy textural quality that, rather than accentuating Allen’s rawness, is obtrusive and distracts from her power. Still, part of the heartbreak inherent to this song comes in how clearly it was written while Allen actively processed these discoveries; it’s only fitting that the track should sound like a demo of itself.
[7]