Rising pop star Chappell Roan wins BBC Sound Of 2025
Pop star Chappell Roan has started her year on a high, winning the BBC Radio 1’s Sound of 2025 – the station’s annual poll to identify music’s biggest rising stars.
Her win caps a wild 12 months in which she rocketed from relative obscurity to the top of the charts, thanks to her colourful, 80s-influenced brand of synth-pop.
She was named winner by a panel of more than 180 musicians and experts, including Sir Elton John, Dua Lipa and Sound of 2014 winner Sam Smith.
Jack Saunders, who hosts Radio 1’s New Music show, said: “No one deserves this accolade more than Chappell Roan. She was the most exciting artist of the last 12 months and is now set to be the artist of the next 12 months.”
The 26-year-old has had a long path to success.Born Kayleigh Amstutz, she was brought up in the conservative city of Willard, Missouri, where she attended church three times a week and was taught that being gay was a sin.
She signed her first record deal in 2017, based on the strength of a song she had uploaded to YouTube called Die Young.
Cast as a singer-songwriter in mould of Lorde and Lana Del Rey, she failed to make much of an impact, and was dropped by her label during the pandemic.
But by that stage, she had already recorded a song that would become her calling card.
Titled Pink Pony Club, it was inspired by a visit to an LA gay club, and helped her define a new sound – camp, liberated and packed with singalong choruses.
The experience also spawned her campy stage persona, which she has described as a “larger-than-life, drag queen version of myself”.
