A FaceTime call featured in the album’s opening track sets the scene for a shift in Allen’s personal life. Her husband wants to open their marriage, and by track four, “Tennis,” he seems to be engaged in an affair with a woman the couple knows. “Who the fuck is Madeline?” Allen repeatedly cries, a question she answers on the following song of the same name. On “Madeline,” she sings about messaging a woman her husband has been sleeping with: “We had an arrangement / Be discreet and don’t be blatant / There had to be payment / It had to be with strangers / But you’re not a stranger, Madeline.” In an interview with The Times, Allen insisted that Madeline was “a fictional character,” but a costume designer named Natalie Tippett has claimed in an interview with The Mail On Sunday that she is the mystery woman in question.
Allen, who has been sober since 2019, admits she struggled with feeling the “need to be numb” in “Relapse.” On another track, “Dallas Major,” she playfully croons about DM’ing other men under an alias in an effort to appease her husband’s arrangement: “So I go by Dallas Major but that’s not really my name / You know I used to be quite famous, that was way back in the day / Yes I’m here for validation and I probably should explain / How my marriage has been opened since my husband went astray.”
Some of the most pointed accusations arrive in the song “Pussy Palace,” in which Allen sings about taking some of her partner’s things to the couple’s West Village apartment, where her husband stayed for a period. While there, she discovered a plastic Duane Reade bag, “with the handles tied / sex toys, butt plugs, lube inside.” Upon finding Pandora’s box, Allen wonders aloud, “am I looking at a sex addict?”
