Chappell Roan perfectly closes an era with “The Subway”

Heartbreak is all-encompassing on Roan’s colossal new song — her final word before she embarks on her next chapter.

Have you ever been through a break-up so bad that the city you live in feels like it’s mocking you? Every street corner, bridge, and park bench is somehow a reminder of what you just lost. Their face is there, from the person passing quickly on the sidewalk to the smooth faces on the advertising hoarding; everywhere and yet nowhere at the same time. On her new song “The Subway,” Chappell Roan takes this feeling of overblown and inescapable torture and turns it into an emphatic ballad that sounds like spending years making memories with someone only for the streets to feel like a gauntlet overnight, like a Google Map dotted with broken hearts.

The setting of “The Subway” is incidental, it could just as easily be about a bar or a movie theater, but Roan writes with a tormented specificity that makes it feel as real as missing the train you’re rushing to catch. The reminders are far and wide for her, even in the things she can’t fully see like clouds of a perfume smelled with every hug and the shadowy corners of a new hook up’s bedroom. “I’m still counting down all of the days ‘til you’re just another girl on the subway,” she sings, using the anonymity of the densely packed trainline as a road map to moving on.

She packs this timeline of crashing out to a mid-tempo ballad that puts feeling ahead of the exuberance of her biggest hits. Roan has compared the song to “Casual,” a similarly exposed missive from the trenches of a relationship and the two songs do feel tethered to each other with this new track charting how things end, rather than begin.

“The Subway” is a great New York song at its core. 2025 has been a big year for NYC-based pop songs, from Lorde bathed in blue light at Baby’s All Right to Addison Rae finding a new religion after dropping her bags at the Bowery. “The Subway” is not as carefree than those tracks but similarly evocative of the city. Where New Zealander Lorde and Los Angeles-based Rae find new identities underneath the club lights, “The Subway” is about what happens when you spend too long in one place and those fresh beginnings dissipate into faded visions of a better time. Have you really lived in a major city until you have made hasty plans to leave it? Roan reaches that point as her song reaches its breaking point. “Fuck this city, I’m movin’ to Saskatchewan” she cries, landing on an unlikely exit route.

Roan isn’t moving to Canada any time soon, of course. She recently announced a bunch of live dates that will take place before she heads off to write the follow-up to The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. With that in mind, this is a way of clearing house and keeping fans fed. The pressure might be on to follow up that breakout album but “The Subway” suggests Roan won’t face any obstacles. After all, she’s far too famous to use public transport now, anyway.