Chappell Roan ushered in August with the long-anticipated release of her new single “The Subway," which she debuted at Governors Ball last year and has been performing live at during her festival stops, including at her historic Lollapalooza and Primavera Sound sets. But if you thought the single's arrival meant a new album is on the way, you might have to think again.
Speaking to Vogue about “The Subway,” Chappell Roan took the chance to clear the air about the timeline of the long-anticipated follow-up to her Grammy-winning debut album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, admitting that “the second project doesn’t exist yet."
“There is no album. There is no collection of songs," Roan added, explaining that that will likely be the case for a while. “It took me five years to write [The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess], 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.”
While Roan did not specify whether that's five years from now, which would make it 2030, or five years after the release of The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, which would make it 2028, the overall message is don't expect a full-length project from the star in the near future.
Given the success of her debut project, expectations are higher than ever for Roan's sophomore project, but she's not letting outside pressure affect her creative process. “I don’t think I make good music whenever I force myself to do anything,” Roan told Vogue. “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 star also admitted this is the first time she's gone into the process of creating an album without any external influences. “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.”
For now, though, it seems like Roan is prioritizing the road over the studio. The star is currently on a months-long festival tour across Europe, and she's just announced extra pop-up shows in the US for the fall as part of her Visions of Damsels & Other Dangerous Things tour, with four nights in New York's Forest Hills Stadium and extra stops in Kansas City and Pasadena.
