The midwest princess embraces her roots with a queer country banger about pleasure that toys with the genre’s gender and class cosplay

It’s easy to forget that in the year that Chappell Roan became one of the world’s biggest pop stars, she only released one single. Good Luck, Babe! came out in April 2024, precipitating the explosion of the US pop star as a live phenomenon who made pop hyper fun and queer again, while also remaining strikingly principled about how far she was willing to go for her art.

When streaming demands that pop stars pebbledash releases in order to stay buoyant on playlists, her disinclination to capitalise on Good Luck, Babe!’s success with more material is reflective of Roan’s confidence in her way of doing things, whether persisting with a vision that her previous label rejected – and being totally vindicated for it – or using her recent Grammys win to call for labels to provide musicians with proper healthcare. The tactic has paid off: in the absence of new songs, Pink Pony Club – the song Atlantic dropped her over – reached UK No 1 last week, almost five years after its original release. Her debut album, 2023’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, has been in the UK Top 10 since June, taking two separate weeks at No 1.