Just hours after the long-awaited release of her new single, “The Subway,” Chappell Roan has shared a music video for the song, a ballad she performed for the first time more than a year ago, at the 2024 Governors Ball festival.
The clip, directed by Amber Grace Johnson (Jorja Smith, FKA Twigs), is a New York City-themed fantasy that features the singer in multiple, often surreal scenes: walking down crowded sidewalks in a variety of comically longhaired wigs, splashing around in the Washington Square Park fountain, peeling off a business suit on a windblown street, and of course riding the subway.
Chappell says in the press release announcing the video, “The cliche of “the girl that got away” barely scratches the surface for me with this song. I wrote it as I was stumbling around New York with a broken heart and I kept envisioning us on every street, fire escape, coffee shop, park and yes… the subway.”
Although it wasn’t released until Friday, “The Subway” found a life of its own on TikTok this year, with fans picking the outro — in which Roan belts, “She’s got, she’s got a way / She’s got a way, she’s got a way” — to soundtrack nostalgic video clips and photos (over 100,000 posts have used the unofficial audio).
The music video comes just days after the Grammy winner announced a series of pop-up shows scheduled for later this year. In making the announcement, Roan confirmed that she’s working on the follow-up to her debut album, “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess.” She said the shows were her effort “to do something special before going away to write the next album.”
Roan hasn’t shared new music since “The Giver” earlier this year, which came after the success of her breakout single “Good Luck, Babe!” The single peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and reached No. 1 in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and more.
Roan’s upcoming pop up shows — a run she’s dubbed “Visions of Damsels and Other Dangerous Things” — will take place throughout September and October. This includes four consecutive nights at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, N.Y., two at Museum and Memorial Park in Kansas City, M.O., and two at Brookside at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, C.A.
