Why Did Chappell Roan Skip the 2025 VMAs?

Chappell Roan may have been nominated for Song of the Summer for “The Subway” at the 2025 VMAs, but she didn’t make her way to the red carpet this time around. While she recently wrapped up a festival circuit overseas, the 2024 VMA winner for Best New Artist is performing a slew of pop-up shows in Los Angeles, New York, and Kansas City this month.

She revealed that after her international shows, she planned on “taking a little nap” before her first shows in NYC starting on September 20.

Ahead of her upcoming shows, Chappell talked to Vogue about pushing the release of “The Subway” by several months, saying, “I just wasn’t ready to put it out yet. It was just too painful. I was just too angry and scared—just about my life—to put it out.”

“I was having a hard time getting over this one person, and I just could not get over them,” she added. “When I was writing, I was constantly trying to be like, We’re done, we’re done, we’re done, we’re done. The feelings are still there, even though we’re done.”

As for the video for “Subway,” Chappell said “I haven’t done a video in years because they’re so unnecessarily hard and sometimes traumatic. It’s such a labor of love that I’m like, I don’t know if I have that love in my heart right now. I didn’t want it to be super serious It is a serious song, but at the same time it’s not, because I say, ‘Fuck this city, I’m moving to Saskatchewan.’ It’s not that serious.”

Oh, and re: her next album? It’ll be a minute. “It took me five years to write the first one, and it’s probably going to take at least five to write the next,” she said. “I’m not that type of writer that can pump it out. I don’t think I make good music whenever I force myself to do anything. I see some comments sometimes, like, ‘She’s everywhere except that damn studio.’ Even if I was in the studio 12 hours a day, every single day, that does not mean that you would get an album any faster.”