On a humid July afternoon, Chappell Roan is standing near the doors of a subway car, fiery red hair cloaking her pale, moonlike face. But the 27-year-old pop star—born Kayleigh Rose Amstutz—isn’t packed in with New York’s myriad commuters. Instead she’s transformed a decommissioned car at the New York Transit Museum in Downtown Brooklyn into a strobe-lit club to film the music video for her latest single, “The Subway.”
Ever since she debuted the song last year at the Governors Ball music festival, fans have pleaded for a studio recording. At first, Roan planned to release “The Subway” in April. Then she pushed it to June. Then July. When it dropped last Thursday night, she quickly ascended to the number one spot on the global Spotify chart, becoming the most-streamed debut by a female artist this year.
“I just wasn’t ready to put it out yet,” Roan tells me in her trailer. “It was just too painful. I was just too angry and scared—just about my life—to put it out.” That’s all changed now.
“The Subway” details the jittering adrenaline rush that comes with encountering an ex. “I was having a hard time getting over this one person, and I just could not get over them,” Roan says, as her glam team braids her hair and paints blooms of pink onto her cheeks. “When I was writing, I was constantly trying to be like, We’re done, we’re done, we’re done, we’re done. The feelings are still there, even though we’re done.”
The song, which Roan cowrote with its producer, Daniel Nigro, proved an arduous creative undertaking. She compares “The Subway” to her early hit “Casual,” a song about wanting someone who won’t commit, both in terms of its content and the production process. “It took an annoying amount of time to just get it right,” she says.
The same was true of the music video. “I haven’t done a video in years because they’re so unnecessarily hard and sometimes traumatic,” she says. After releasing her singles “Good Luck, Babe!” in 2024 and “The Giver” earlier this year, Roan didn’t feel she had the time or the energy to create accompanying visuals. “It’s such a labor of love that I’m like, I don’t know if I have that love in my heart right now,” she says.
“The Subway” was a different story: Roan dreamed up a campy, New York romp that follows the star, all but swallowed up by her red mane, as she pursues the green-haired, Cousin It–esque creature who broke her heart. (On set, I watch Roan—styled by Genesis Webb in a human hair two-piece by Todd Thomas and John Novotny—dance her way through a bustling, clubby train car in pursuit of the anthropomorphic green wig.) “I didn’t want it to be super serious,” she says. “It is a serious song, but at the same time it’s not, because I say, ‘Fuck this city, I’m moving to Saskatchewan.’ It’s not that serious.”
The day after we met at the museum, fans spotted Roan filming in Manhattan, her locks cascading down a fire escape like Rapunzel’s, dressed in a Connor O’Grady cone bra and skirt made of matching human hair. It took almost no time at all for sleuths to match grainy videos of her lip-synching to the song’s lyrics. The TikToks proliferated within hours, and photos of Roan shooting another scene, in which she is dragged hair-first by a taxi, dressed in an oversized suit by AC Gottleib and James Nguyen, spread like wildfire online. (Even when it’s not used as an extravagant prop, Roan finds that her hair draws attention: “I can’t hide if my hair is out,” she says. “I just cover it and wear a wig. I got pretty frustrated with my hair and got really close to cutting it all off or dyeing it really dark so it just didn’t scream red hair, but it’s always been a part of my brand.”)
The triumph of Roan’s Grammy-winning debut album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, has prompted much speculation about its follow-up, with fans scrutinizing her recent fixation on dragons, knights, and other medieval motifs and noting how the lyric video for “The Giver” features a DVD menu that scrolls past tracks called “To Be Yours” and “Read Make Out.”
But “the second project doesn’t exist yet,” Roan clarifies. “There is no album. There is no collection of songs.”
She goes on: “It took me five years to write the first one, and it’s probably going to take at least five to write the next. I’m not that type of writer that can pump it out.” Nor does Roan see any creative value in churning out music under pressure. “I don’t think I make good music whenever I force myself to do anything,” she says. “I see some comments sometimes, like, ‘She’s everywhere except that damn studio.’ Even if I was in the studio 12 hours a day, every single day, that does not mean that you would get an album any faster.”
And on that note: These days Roan only goes on Instagram to post before swiftly deleting the app from her phone again. “Socials harm the fuck out of me and my art,” she says. “I’m not doing that to myself anymore.” She’s excited to see how her project will develop without the internet’s influence. “I’ve never written an album where I don’t have Instagram or anything,” she says. “The album process is purely, only mine. No one on TikTok gets to see it.”
Besides, there’s so much to experience and be present for in her real life. Roan has spent the last few months living in New York with her best friend and creative director, Ramisha Sattar. “I have to see what New York is like in my 20s, ’cause it’s what everyone says,” she says. She’s enjoyed exploring the food scene and biking around town (“which is my favorite thing ever”), though not even pop stars are exempt from the city’s take-no-prisoners attitude. “New York is doing exactly what it does to me, which is kicking my ass,” she says, to a chorus of empathetic mm-hmms and nods from her team.
But these days, Roan is feeling optimistic about what lies ahead, which includes a series of pop-up shows this fall in New York, Los Angeles, and Kansas City, Missouri. “This pace is good right now,” she says. “This feels good and manageable. I feel like, for the first time in over a year, I can finally be excited about going to work and doing my job.”
