Pop star Chappell Roan wins the BBC Sound Of 2025

Pop star Chappell Roan has won 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.”

An exclusive interview with the singer will be published by Radio 1 and BBC News in the coming weeks.

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”.

After finding a new record label, she released her debut album, The Rise And Fall Of A Midwest Princess, in September 2023.

A slow-burning success, it only sold a few thousand copies in its first week of release. But word began to spread – and when she played California’s Coachella Festival last April, the crowd that turned up for her mid-afternoon set was huge.

More importantly, the show was broadcast on YouTube – going viral after Roan leaned into the TV cameras and declared: “I’m your favourite artist’s favourite artist.” The performance has subsequently been watched more than a million times.

Around the same time, she released a stand-alone single called Good Luck, Babe, that talked about her experience of falling in love with her best friend.

“It’s a pop song with a sad element to it,” she told BBC News last year.

“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.

“And it’s like, ‘Sure, OK. Your time will come.'”

The single eventually reached number two in the UK charts, and The Rise And Fall Of The Midwest Princess became a number one album after it was re-released on vinyl last summer.

Since then, Roan has been nominated for six Grammy awards, including album of the year, and won best new artist at the Billboard Music Awards in December.

She has also experienced the downside of her sudden fame, and spoke out about the “creepy behaviour” of certain fans who “yelled” and “harassed” her at private moments; and who had approached her family and friends.

The singer has taken time off at the start of 2025 to work on new music, but will headline the Reading & Leeds festival this summer.

Previous winners of the BBC’s Sound of list include Adele, Ellie Goulding, 50 Cent, PinkPantheress and girl group Flo.

Art-rock group The Last Dinner Party took the title last year, and went on to top the charts with their debut album, Prelude To Ecstasy.

Runners-up for this year’s prize included jazz outfit Ezra Collective and dance producer Barry Can’t Swim.

To qualify, artists could not have had more than two UK top 10 albums or two UK top 10 singles by 30 September 2024.

The rules were relaxed this year to recognise the challenges of achieving crossover success in the streaming era – when an artist can reach number one without becoming a household name.