Time feels evermore like a ludicrous concept in 2025, but it especially collapses when considering the career of Chappell Roan. The Missouri-born pop artist languished in up-and-coming mode for years – I first learned of her prismatic gay club anthem Pink Pony Club via a friend’s recommendation in 2020 – only to experience one of the swiftest ascents into the mainstream I’ve ever witnessed. Just 18 months ago, she was still playing 2,000-cap amphitheaters in mid-sized cities; by summer’s end, she drew the largest crowd (more than 100,000) that Chicago’s Lollapalooza festival has ever seen. Her rise was so vertiginous – viral Tiny Desk, Grammys best new artist, festival undercard to headliner, international chart takeover – that she feels lifetimes away from the artist I saw, stunned by her own zeitgeist earthquake at New York’s Governors Ball in June of last year.
Her return to New York at Forest Hills stadium this weekend, her first live shows in the US in a year, thus represents a homecoming of sorts, and a victory lap for the occasionally rocky journey into the stratosphere. Her eight “pop-up” shows this fall, billed as the Visions of Damsels & Other Dangerous Things tour, span the geographical linchpins of her music: four shows in New York, site of sexual awakenings (Naked in Manhattan) and devastating breakups (new single The Subway, the night’s pre-eminent vehicle for Roan’s torrential belt); two in Kansas City, Missouri, a few hours from her hometown of Willard; and two in Los Angeles, where Roan forged the joyously queer and infectiously cheeky pop of her debut and still only studio album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess.
