Chappell Roan’s thick-skinned ‘The Subway’ captures a survivalist New York mood

If you’re someone who calls New York City home — someone who is unfazed by rats, cockroaches and bad landlords (know your rights!), who would trade any Casper mattress ad for Dr. Zizmor’s rainbow, who would never wait in line for anything you saw an influencer rave about on TikTok — then the wide-eyed way so many visiting pop stars sing about the city always lands far too cute.

To the Taylor Swifts of the world, New York City is the beckoning playground of bright lights and big dreams most mainstream rom-coms make it out to be, a sense of promise and romance lurking around every Village or Williamsburg (it’s always one of those neighborhoods, sorry) corner. “Feel so free, feel so free” the Los Angeles native pop star Addison Rae sang on this year’s “New York,” hopping from club to club after dropping her bags off at the name-checked Bowery Hotel. On Lorde’s recent album Virgin, she sang of dancing in the glow of venues like Baby’s All Right and the “voices of the ancients” calling out for her in the city streets.

Of course New York City is easy to romanticize. But the longer you’re here, the better chance you have of that playground becoming an emotional minefield. New York City, for all its freedom, also requires a sense of stoicism and even coldness from its inhabitants — this is a city where you can cry openly on the subway without some well-meaning but incorrect stranger trying to console you. That’s a reality Chappell Roan gets on her latest break-up song “The Subway,” a song she first debuted live at New York’s Governor’s Ball Festival nearly a year ago, about spotting her ex on the train and almost having “a breakdown.” “It’s not over ’til I don’t look for you on the staircase, or wish you thought that we were still soulmates,” she sings. “But I’m still counting down all of the days, ’til you’re just another girl on the subway.”

It’s a far cry from the last time she released a song about the city, 2023’s “Naked In Manhattan” from The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. There, in a pulsing, ’80s synth-pop number that has become Roan’s specialty, the city was the stage for the singer’s sexual experimentation, and Manhattan’s allure a metaphor for being with another woman. “It’s similar to the way that New York City makes me feel,” Roan said in an interview about the earlier song. “Which is like, excited and kind of like, wanderlust, and it’s the same as a girl.” “In New York, you can try things,” Roan sings on that song, capturing the city’s seemingly endless array of pleasures and possibilities for her taking.

“The Subway,” released during one of the worst weeks in recent memory for NYC’s public transportation, instead finds Chappell Roan confronted not with the city’s pleasures but its unique severity, which is played up for comedy in the song’s accompanying music video. Rats crawl in the singer’s hilariously long red curls, which later get stuck in a taxi cab door and drag her through the street. In one scene, she floats in Washington Square Park’s fountain like Millais’ Ophelia while a young couple makes out a few feet away. Partying drag queens and tired commuters pay her no mind while she’s wallowing in the middle of a subway car. Whether in love or heartbroken, Roan still finds the drama and romance in the city’s chaos.

But “The Subway” doesn’t play like the high-camp, theatrical pop bangers Roan’s been cranking out since becoming a household name in the last few years, pulling instead from the ’90s jangle-pop acts like The Sundays and The Cranberries, letting her vocals wail at the song’s end not unlike the latter’s late lead singer Dolores O’Riordan. But don’t worry, “The Subway” still retains Roan’s saltier impulses. “I made a promise, if in four months this feeling ain’t gone,” she sings. “Well, f*** this city, I’m movin’ to Saskatchewan.” In a city this big, having to see your ex on the subway and pretend they’re just a stranger? Sounds like New York to me.