Hot off a breakout year last year and kicking off 2025 with her first Grammy win, Chappell Roan is setting the stage for her forthcoming sophomore album. The hit-making singer first gave a taste of her next project last year with “Good Luck, Babe!” and earlier this year with “The Giver,” both top-5 singles on the Billboard Hot 100.
For her latest release, Roan has returned with “The Subway,” another link-up with frequent collaborator and Grammy Producer of the Year Dan Nigro.
“I saw your green hair / Beauty mark next to your mouth / There on the subway / I nearly had a breakdown,” she sings on the track. “’Til I don’t look for you on the staircase / Or wish you still thought we were soulmates / I’m still counting down all of the days / ‘Til you’re just another girl on the subway.”
When Roan looks back on how far she’s come in just a few years in the spotlight, she remembers struggling to persevere on her path to the public eye.
“I kept hope alive because I knew I was really good. I knew I had to just give it one more year. And I got that courage by, honestly, just being in hell for a very long time. I was like, ‘This sucks so bad, but keep going,’” she told W magazine in April. “Every day I would think, ‘Keep going, even if there was no sight of any light at the end of the tunnel.’ Zero! But I was like, ‘What if it’s just around the corner? What if I stopped the day before that something is meant to happen?”’ So I just kept going, and here we are.”
Roan’s Visions of Damsels & Other Dangerous Things Tour kicks off Sept. 20 in New York and wraps up Oct. 11 in Pasadena.