Lily Allen has revealed that she is “trying to manifest” getting a new album “out by the end of the year”.
Speaking on her Miss Me? podcast with close friend and presenter Miquita Oliver, the singer shared that she’s hoping 2025 will be the year she releases a follow-up to her last LP – 2018’s ‘No Shame‘.
“Firstly, I’m going to go and get my head straight for a bit,” she said. “I’m doing a little bit of work on myself in this beginning period of the year, then I’m going to do some more writing, then I’m going to do my play [Hedda Gabler], hopefully, maybe get an album out by the end of the year. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”
“It’s not real, I’m just trying to manifest it now,” she continued, before later adding: “Listen, I’ve got this. We’re bringing Lily Allen back in 2025.”
Allen has been teasing a return to music for a while, revealing last year that she had been working on new material in Nashville, Tennessee. “There’s so much legacy [in Nashville],” she said on a previous episode of her podcast. “I have to say it’s quite intimidating being here. People are really talented.”
She later revealed that, while in the city, she had been “trying some stuff out” with country music. Her foray into the genre came after she criticised Beyoncé‘s recent move into country with her most recent album ‘Cowboy Carter’, with Allen saying she found it “weird” that the singer chose to cover Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’.
“It’s very weird, that you’d cover the most successful songs in that genre,” she said. “It’s quite an interesting thing to do when you’re trying to, like, tackle a genre and you just choose the biggest song in that genre to cover.
“I mean, you do you, Beyoncé – and she literally is doing her, but why is she doing Dolly?”
The news she’d ventured into the country genre herself emerged during an appearance on Nick Grimshaw and Angela Hartnett’s Dish podcast.
“I’m just making some space for some music, for some music to reveal itself,” she explained (via The Standard). “It’s not an album… it’s just, yeah. I’m just, you know, trying some stuff out [to] see if it works. I do love country and Western music. And also I feel like with my writing, it’s quite storytelling, sort of like narrative-led music.”
Prior to that, in January last year, she revealed that she had already written around 50 songs for a potential new album.
It followed her sharing that she had returned to the studio in 2023 after her special guest performance at Olivia Rodrigo’s Glastonbury 2022 set. The blockbuster performance – which saw her and Rodrigo duetting ‘Fuck You’ – prompted her to hint that she might not be retiring from music just yet.
Speaking about returning to the studio, Allen accredited the performance with Rodrigo for “sparking something” in her that rekindled her yearning to write and record new music. Before this, Allen said in 2020 that she had finished working on a new album and was writing for three musicals at the time, though that supposed album has never been released.
Her aforementioned comments about getting her “head straight” follow her sharing in December that she is “not in a good place mentally” and “stopped eating” at the moment, adding that she’s been “going through a tough time over the last few months”.
In other news, Allen recently revealed that she makes more money selling feet pictures on OnlyFans than she does from Spotify. The singer started operating on the platform as the result of a conversation she had with her nail technician.
“I have a lady that comes and does my nails,” she told co-host Miquita Oliver. “They informed me that I have five stars on WikiFeet, which is quite rare. My feet are rated quite highly on the internet.”
Shortly after launching the page, Allen said she had received an “eye-opening” response. “I’ve had a lot of disparaging, you know, horrible messages in my DMs,” she said. “I’m talking really personal, nasty.”
Elsewhere, Allen and Oliver recently confirmed that they will be bringing their Miss Me? podcast to a live audience for the first time in London this year. The podcast – a Persephonica production for BBC Sounds – launched in March this year and its first live edition will be recorded with an audience at the Hackney Empire on March 6, 2025.
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