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Lily Allen is back - and not before time. It's been almost five years since the outspoken Londoner released her second album, and we feared her lost forever to the trappings of motherhood, destined to spend forever playing with Lego and watching Jeremy Kyle, Doctors and whatever else it is people are forced to endure when they don't go to work.
Sadly, her painfully twee cover of Keane's 'Somewhere Only We Know' seemed like the last nail in the coffin for the star who once gave us moderate LOLs with tracks such as her epic 'Nan, You're Window Shopper' and the like.
BUT FRET NOT! Lily Allen's 'proper' new single 'Hard Out Here' shows that being a mum has does nothing to dull her insightful lyrics, and has spent her pop absence getting pissed off by the likes of Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke.
The lyrics are classic Allen ('forget your balls and grow a pair of tits'), and the video has numerous moments of brilliance - including her attempt to twerk, mocking product placement, having invasive lipo-suction to prepare for her comeback and best of all, dancing around in front of huge balloons spelling out the words 'Lily Allen has a baggy pussy'.
'Hard Out Here' is the massive eye roll, the pokes in the ribs that the pop world needed. In 2013, Miley Cyrus has undressed herself to global superstardom, Katy Perry has put her own divorce through the ringer to pen her Prism album and Lady Gaga has talked about the importance of her ARTPOP album to an unbearable extent. Lily Allen returns and swipes the lot of them off the playing field with one, self-referential single - simply about some of the stuff going on around her that she doesn't like very much.
While rival stars attempt to turn their priviledged lives into something relatable to their audience, Lily Allen does it with ease, and sings about what we're all talking about in the pub. As always, she makes it seem effortless and most of all, fun. There's no controversy here and there's no pretension. It's a pop song and it's rude and it's silly.
'Hard Out Here' is no great work of genius, but having Lily Allen back at the end of what has been a fairly unpleasant year for women in music is exactly what pop needed. We just can't wait for the Miley Cyrus quotes to start rolling in...
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