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Chappell Roan is not a pop star who’s in much of a hurry. While contemporaries like Sabrina Carpenter are onto a third album in four years, Roan is content to tease a song for well over a year before actually releasing. Last week, the artist shared “The Subway,” a song she first performed live at New York’s Gov Ball in June 2024. Her previous single, “The Giver,” was released in March after first performing it on Saturday Night Live last fall. Between these tracks and 2024’s smash loosie “Good Luck, Babe!”, it would be reasonable to assume there’s a second album on the way—but Roan warns us all not to get ahead of ourselves.
“[T]he second project doesn’t exist yet,” Roan says in an interview with Vogue, published this morning. “There is no album. There is no collection of songs.” Other than the singles released after her 2023 debut album The Rise And Fall Of A Midwest Princess, fans have speculated that there might be some more new songs in the vault called “To Be Yours” or “Read & Make Out” due to those terms appearing in the visual for “The Giver.” Even if those songs do exist somewhere, they definitely don’t seem to belong to a completed sophomore album.
“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,” the singer continues. “I don’t think I make good music whenever I force myself to do anything. 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.” The proof for this is in “The Subway,” which Roan nurtured and preened for over a year because “It took an annoying amount of time to just get it right.” And if it takes an annoying amount of time to get the album right, well, so be it.
