“I’d be more successful if I wore a muzzle”

Roan Chapel is unstoppable.

Over the past 12 months, the 26-year-old has become pop’s loudest star. A flamboyant, flame-haired sensation whose songs are as colorful as they are raw.

Her debut album, quietly released in 2023, has just topped the UK charts for the second time. She’s up for six Grammys next week, including best new artist. And BBC Radio 1 called her their own Sound of 2025.

The success was all the more gratifying because her former label refused to release many of the songs that blew up the charts last year.

“They were like, ‘This isn’t going to work.’ We don’t get it,” Roan tells Radio 1’s Jack Saunders.

Reaching the pop chart is not just an excuse, it’s a revolution.

The 26-year-old is the first female pop star to achieve mainstream success as an openly queer individual rather than acting as part of her post-fame narrative.

On a more personal level, she finally did well enough to move into her own home and get a rescue cat named Cherub Lou.

“She’s very small, her breath smells so bad, and she doesn’t meow,” worries the singer.

If owning kittens is the perk of fame, Roan bristled at the downside.

She spoke out against abusive fans, calling out “horrible behavior” from people stalking her in airport lines and “haunting” her parents’ house. Last September, she went viral for berating a photographer who bad-mouthed stars on the MTV Awards red carpet.

“I looked around and thought, ‘Is this what people get along with all the time?’ And I should behave normally? This is not normal. It’s crazy,” she recalls.

The incident made headlines. British tabloids called her outburst the “tantrum” of a “spoiled diva.”

But Roan is unapologetic.

“I’ve been responding in ways that have been disrespectful my whole life, but now I’ve got cameras on me and I’m also a pop star and those things don’t add up. It’s like oil and water.”

Roan says musicians are trained to be obedient. Standing up for yourself is portrayed as whining or ungrateful, and bucking convention comes at a high price.

“I think I’d be more successful, actually, if it was okay to wear a muzzle,” she laughs.

“If I override more of my base instincts, where does my heart lead,”Stop, stop, stop, you’re not okay‘, I would be bigger.

“I’d be a lot bigger… And I’d still be on tour right now.”

Indeed, Rohan declined pressure to extend her tour to 2024 to protect her physical and mental health. She attributes this determination to her late grandfather.

“He said something that I think about every step I take in my career. There are always options.”

“So when someone says, ‘Do this gig because you’ll never be offered that much money again,’ it’s like, who cares?

“If I don’t feel like doing it right now, there are always options. There’s no shortage of opportunities. I think about it all the time.”

As fans already know, Roan was born Kaylee Rose Amstutz and grew up in Willard, Missouri, in the Bible Belt.

The eldest of four children, she dreamed of becoming an actress, but for a long time it seemed that her future would be in sports. She competed in state meets and almost went to college for cross country.

She then entered a singing competition at the age of 13 and won. She soon wrote her first song about falling in love with a Mormon boy who wasn’t allowed to date outside of his faith.

She took her stage name as a tribute to her grandfather Dennis K Chappell and his favorite song, a western ballad called The Strawberry Roan.

“He was very funny and very smart,” she recalls. “And I don’t think he ever doubted my ability.

“A lot of people were like, ‘You should go all country,’ or, ‘You should try Christian music.’ And he never told me to do anything.

“He was the only person who said, ‘You don’t need a plan B. Just do it.’

Eventually one of her compositions, a gothic ballad called Die Young, caught the attention of Atlantic Records, who signed her to a contract at the age of just 17.

After moving to Los Angeles, she recorded and released her first EP, School Nights, in 2017. It was a good but unremarkable affair, steeped in the sounds of Lana Del Rey and Lorde.

Roan only found her own sound when a group of gay friends took her to a drag bar.

“I went to that club in West Hollywood and it was like heaven” she told the BBC last year. “It was amazing to see all these people who were happy and confident in their bodies.

“And go-go dancers! I was delighted. I couldn’t stop looking at them. I was like, ‘I have to do this.'”

She didn’t become a dancer, but she wrote the song imagining what it would be like to be her and how her mother would react. Roan called it Pink Pony Club after a strip bar in her hometown.

“That song changed everything,” she says. “It put me in a new category.

“I never thought I could be a ‘girl pop star’ and The Pink Pony made me do it.”

Her label disagreed. They refused to release Pink Pony Club for two years. Shortly after they conceded, Roan was dropped in a round of pandemic-era cost-cutting.

Bruised but not broken, she returned home and spent the next year serving coffee at a drive-thru donut shop.

“It had an absolutely positive effect on me,” she says. “You have knowledge of what it’s like to clean a public toilet. This is very important.”

The period was transformative in other ways as well. She saved her wages, got her heart broken by a man “with pale blue eyes”, returned to Los Angeles and gave herself a year to mature.

It may have taken a little longer, but she hit the ground running.

During her exile, Roan kept in touch with her Pink Pony Club co-creator, Daniel Nigro.

He also worked with another up-and-coming singer, Olivia Rodrigo, and as her career took off, Roan was given a courtside seat, backing Rodrigo on tour and backing vocals on her second album, Guts.

More importantly, Nigro used the momentum to sign Roan to his own label and secure the release of her debut album in September 2023.

At first it seemed that Roan’s original label was right. Sales were disappointing, and audiences were slow to catch on, because her weird, in-your-face anthems didn’t fit the trend for whispery, confessional pop.

But those songs came to life on stage. Big, fun and built for audience participation, they rise to new heights with Roan’s powerful voice and vibrant stage presence.

“A drag queen doesn’t come on stage to appease people,” she says. “A drag queen doesn’t say things to flatter people. The queen makes you blush, you know what I mean? Expect the same energy at my show.”

It was certainly her live performance at last year’s Coachella festival that propelled her into the upper echelons of pop music.

Dressed in a PVC crop top emblazoned with ‘Eat Me’, she performed to a packed Gobi Tent as a headliner, striding purposefully around the stage and coaching the crowd in campy choreography to Hot To Go.

She then stared straight into the camera and dedicated a song to her ex.

“Bitch, I know you’re watching… and all the horrible things that happen to you are karma.”

The clip went viral, and soon so did her career.

By the summer, all her shows had been upgraded. Festivals continued to move her to big stages. When she played Lollapalooza in August, she drew the largest audience for an afternoon event.

“It only takes ten years,” she says. “That’s what I tell everybody. “If you’re okay with it taking 10 years, then you’re okay.”

As fans learned of her debut album, Rohan also released a single, a sarcastic piece of synth-pop called Good Luck Babe, which became her breakthrough hit.

“I don’t even know if I’ve ever said it in an interview, but it was originally called Good Luck Jane,” she reveals.

“I wanted it to be about how I fell in love with my best friend and then she was like, ‘Hahaha, I don’t like you, I like boys.’

“And it was like, ‘Okay, well, good luck with that, Jane‘.”

A masterclass in pop storytelling, Good Luck Babe has the right three-act structure, with a killer middle-eight payoff and a chorus you just can’t put down.

Still, Roan was shocked by his success.

“I just threw it out, like, I don’t know what it’s going to do – and it went on for a whole year!”

The question, of course, is what the star will do next now that she’s the Sound of 2025.

She has already previewed two new songs, The Subway and The Giver, in concert, but all she will say about the second album is that she “doesn’t want to be sad and dark anymore”.

“It’s so nice at a party,” she explains.

Looking back on the past 12 months, she philosophizes about what it means to be pop’s hottest new commodity.

“Many people believe that fame is the pinnacle of success, because what more could you want than worship?”

Roan does admit that admiring strangers is more “addictive” than she expected.

“Like, I understand why I’m so afraid of losing that feeling.

“It’s so scary to think that one day people won’t care about you like they do now, and I think (that idea) lives in women’s brains very differently than men’s.”

Ultimately, she decides, success and failure are “out of my control.” Instead, she wants to make good choices.

“If I can look back and say, ‘I didn’t collapse under the weight of expectations and I didn’t suffer abuse or blackmail,’ (then) at least I stayed true to my heart,” she says.

“As I said before, there are always options.”

Chappell Roan has been named BBC Radio 1’s Sound Of 2025 by a panel of over 180 musicians, critics and music industry experts.

The top five in order included: