Chappell Roan says her second album does not exist yet and she has “no idea what the next era is”

Chappell Roan has said her second album is not yet underway and its sound remains undecided, speaking in a new conversation with Apple Music 1’s Zane Lowe.

Following debut album ‘The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess’, Roan has released three standalone singles that move across different styles — ‘The Giver’, ‘Good Luck, Babe!’, and ‘The Subway’. She noted she has made little progress on writing a follow-up and does not yet know what the project will be.

“I just think that ‘The Giver,’ ‘Good Luck, Babe!’ [and] ‘The Subway,’ they’re all kind of so different,” Roan began. “So that’s why I’m just like, ‘I have no idea what the next era is.’ That’s the scary part of putting out new music and then people not liking it, because it’s not like the music you made before.”

“It makes you scared to release stuff,” she continued. “You’re like, ‘Well, people aren’t ever going to like it as much as the first one.’ That’s the risk you take every single time.”

The interview follows comments to Vogue in which Roan tempered expectations around a swift follow-up, indicating it could take up to five years to complete. “The second project doesn’t exist yet,” she said at the time. “There is no album. There is no collection of songs.”

Discussing her latest single, Roan described ‘The Subway’ as a “safe” step from ‘Midwest Princess’ towards whatever comes next. “I think it’s a good ring on the ladder,” she said, adding that despite the track’s New York imagery, it was written about her time in Los Angeles.

“‘The Subway’ is just so much more romantic,” she explained. “But it was actually about me hiding in Los Angeles from someone who I was deeply in love with. We weren’t on bad terms, it was just kind of trying to avoid the coffee shops that we went to and parties. And so that’s where it came from, was, ‘Oh my God, I don’t know how to exist in this city.’ I felt pretty lonely there for many years.”

On stylistic experimentation, Roan referenced artistic pivots from elsewhere in pop. “When Gaga released Joanne, and just was like, ‘Oh, I actually have this entire other side of me outside of pop,’ that just builds the character of your artistry,” Roan told Lowe.

Roan’s full interview with Lowe will arrive on Apple Music 1 soon.