The pop star wins the prize after skyrocketing to fame last year
BY YASMIN VINCE, IMAGE BY MTV
Your favourite artist’s favourite artist has started off 2025 strong! Chappell Roan has been awarded BBC Radio 1’s Sound Of 2025, an annual poll to identify the rising stars of the music industry. Her win follows the singer’s sharp boost to superstardom in the last 12 months.
Chappell’s win was voted on by a panel of more than 180 musicians and experts including Dua Lipa and Sir Elton John. Jack Saunders, who hosts Radio 1’s New Music show and presented her with the award said: “No one deserves this accolade more than Chappell Roan.”
Chappell has won the Sound Of 2025 award ahead of the Grammys, for which she’s been nominated in six categories. Previous winners include The Last Dinner Party, who won last year, Years & Years and Adele.
Though she had an almost overnight rise to fame, Chappell’s road to success has been long. The 26-year-old first signed a record deal in 2017 and, after little success, was dropped by that label during the pandemic. It wasn’t until 2023, after she was signed by a new label, that she released her debut album, The Rise And Fall Of A Midwest Princess, with which she catapulted to the top of the charts.
The singer-songwriter has spoken a lot about her queer identity, both in interviews and through her songs. One of her most popular tunes, Good Luck, Babe, dives into compulsory heterosexuality. She told the BBC: “It’s very common in queer relationships, when someone is still coming to terms with their queerness, [that] they’ll kiss 100 boys to ‘stop the feeling’, as the song says.”
Chappell has teased that new music is on the way and debuted a yet unreleased song on SNL last year. She will also headline the Reading and Leeds festival this summer.
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