The Chappell Roan story is one of the stranger pop ascents in recent memory – not because the talent wasn’t always there, but because the window between “cult following” and “everywhere, all the time” compressed to almost nothing. In 2023 she was an artist people felt protective of. In 2024 she was nominated for and won a Grammy. In 2025 she’s dealing with a Rio mayor banning her from a city music event because of a hotel security incident. The gradient is steep.
What makes Roan genuinely interesting as an artist is how specifically queer and Midwestern her pop is. She’s from rural Missouri, and the tension between that origin and the world she now inhabits is the subject matter of much of her best work. The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess is a pop record that actually means something about a particular experience – not aspirationally cosmopolitan, but rooted in the specific discomfort of being too much for the place that made you.
“Pink Pony Club,” “Good Luck, Babe!,” and “Red Wine Supernova” are each doing different things and doing them well. She’s a strong enough songwriter that the pop hooks feel like they’re in service of the songs rather than the other way around.
The complicated relationship she has with fame – the public exhaustion, the boundary-setting that sometimes reads as difficult, the “I do not hate children” statement issued after a hotel incident in Brazil – all of this is the cost of extremely visible, extremely fast celebrity. What’s notable is that she keeps making the more honest choice rather than the more managed one.
Roan is one of the more genuinely original pop artists to arrive in years. The noise around her makes that harder to see, which is worth pushing past.