Alright, Still is the debut studio album by London singer Lily Allen, released July 13, 2006 on Regal Recordings. Recorded between 2004 and 2006 with a rotating cast of producers including Mark Ronson, Greg Kurstin, Blair MacKichan, and Future Cut, the eleven-track, thirty-seven-minute record had an unconventional path to release: most of the songs had been circulating on Allen's Myspace page before the album was formally announced, building a devoted online following that preceded and partly drove the record's commercial breakout. It debuted at number two on the UK Albums Chart, eventually achieving four-times platinum certification in the United Kingdom, gold in the United States, and over 2.5 million copies sold worldwide. Lead single "Smile" — a breezy reggae-pop song about revenge on a cheating ex, built on a sample of Desmond Dekker's "Israelites" — spent two weeks at number one on the UK Singles Chart and established Allen as a distinctive new voice in British pop almost immediately.Musically, the album sits at an unlikely and highly effective intersection of ska, reggae, R&B, and kitchen-sink pop — what Apple Music described as "a sleek listen with clever samples, sonic nods to classic R&B, squelchy reggae and even scratchy grime beats." Allen's lyrics are conversational, bluntly funny, and pointedly autobiographical: "LDN" sketches the gap between London's glossy surface and its grittier underbelly over a bouncy music hall piano loop; "Not Big" dispatches a former partner with cheerfully brutal specificity; and "Alfie," a gentle but exasperated address to her then-directionless younger brother (actor Alfie Allen), closes the record on a note of wry familial affection. Wikipedia notes the album earned a nomination for Best Alternative Music Album at the 50th Grammy Awards, and the record has since been recognized as a defining document of mid-2000s British pop — unflinching in its honesty, effortlessly catchy, and distinctly its own thing.
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