“I would be more successful if I wore a mask.”

Chappelle Rowan is unstoppable.

Over the past 12 months, the 26-year-old has become the buzziest star in pop music. A flamboyant, flame-haired sensation, his songs are as colorful as they are raw.

Her debut album, released to little fanfare in 2023, has just topped the UK charts for the second time. Next week, she will compete for six Grammy Awards, including best new artist. BBC Radio 1 named it after them Voice 2025.

The success was all the sweeter because her previous record label refused to release many of the songs that exploded on the charts last year.

“They were saying, 'This isn't going to work.' We didn't get it,” Rowan told Radio 1's Jack Saunders.

Making it to the pop music A-list is not just proof, it's revolution.

The 26-year-old is the first female pop star to achieve mainstream success as an openly queer person, rather than as part of a post-fame narrative.

On a personal level, she's finally doing well enough to move into a home of her own, and get a rescue cat, named Cherub Lou.

“She's so small, her breath smells so bad, and she doesn't have a meow,” the singer quips.

If kitten ownership was one of the benefits of fame, Rowan worried about the downsides.

I spoke out against abusive fans, Description of “frightening behavior” From people harassing her in airport lines and “haunting” her parents’ house. Last September, she went viral for insulting a photographer who was shouting insults at the stars on the red carpet of the MTV Awards.

“I was looking around, and I was like, 'Is this what people accept all the time?'” she recalls. I'm supposed to act normally? This is not normal. “This is crazy.”

The incident made headlines. British tabloids described her outburst as a “tantrum” from a “spoilt diva.”

But Rowan is unapologetic.

“I've been responding this way to disrespect my whole life — but now there are cameras on me, and I happen to be a pop star, and these things don't match. It's like oil and water.”

Rowan says musicians are trained to obey. Standing up for yourself is portrayed as nagging or ingratitude, and rejecting tradition comes at a cost.

“I think, actually, I would be more successful if I was OK with wearing a mask,” she laughs.

“If I were to get beyond my more basic instincts, where would my heart go?”Stop, stop, stop, you're not okay“I will be bigger.”

“I'm going to be a lot bigger…and I'm still going to be on tour now.”

Indeed, Rawan has rejected pressure to extend her tour into 2024 to protect her physical and mental health. She attributes this decision to her late grandfather.

“There's something he said that I think about every step I make in my career. There are always options.”

“So when someone says, 'Throw this party because you'll never be offered that kind of money again,' they're like, 'Who cares?'

“If I don't feel like doing it right now, there are always options. There's no dearth of opportunities. I think about it all the time.”

As fans will know by now, Rowan Kylie Rose Amstutz was born and raised in the Bible Belt town of Willard, Missouri.

The eldest of four children, she aspired to be an actress – but for a long time, it seemed like her future would be in sports. She ran competitively at the state level, and almost went to college for cross country.

She then entered a singing competition at the age of thirteen and won. It wasn't long until she wrote her first song, about her crush on a Mormon boy who wasn't allowed to date anyone outside his faith.

She took her stage name in honor of her grandfather Dennis K Chappell His favorite song is a western song called The Strawberry Roan.

“He was very funny and very smart,” she recalls. “I don't think he doubted my ability at all.

“A lot of people would say, ‘You should go all country,’ or ‘You should try Christian music.’ And he never asked me to do anything.”

“He was the only one who said, 'You don't need a Plan B.' “Just do it.”

Eventually, one of her compositions, a gothic ballad called Die Young, caught the attention of Atlantic Records, which signed her to a contract at just seventeen years old.

Moving to Los Angeles, she recorded and released her first EP, School Nights, in 2017. It was a powerful but unremarkable experience, steeped in the sounds of Lana Del Rey and Lorde.

It wasn't until a group of gay friends took her to a drag bar that Rowan found her own voice.

“I walked into this club in West Hollywood and it was like heaven.” She told the BBC last year. “It was amazing to see all these people who were happy and confident in their bodies.

“And the dancers! I was amazed. I couldn't stop watching them. I was like, 'I have to do that.'”

She didn't become a dancer, but she wrote a song imagining what it would be like to be a dancer and how her mother would react. Rowan called it Pink Pony Club After a strip bar in her hometown.

“This song changed everything,” she says. “It put me in a new category.

“I never thought I could be a pop star girl, and Pink Pony forced me to.”

Her name changed. They refused to release the Pink Pony Club for two years. Shortly after their decline, Rowan was dropped in a round of pandemic-era cost-cutting.

She returned home, bruised but not broken, and spent the next year serving coffee at a donut shop.

“It definitely had a positive impact on me,” she says. “You have the knowledge of what it means to clean public restrooms. That's very important.”

This period was transformative in other ways. She saved her earnings, had her heart broken by someone with “pale blue eyes,” returned to Los Angeles, and gave herself a year to make it happen.

It may have taken a little longer than that, but she hit the ground running.

During her exile, Rowan kept in touch with Daniel Nigro, her Pink Pony Club co-writer.

He was also working with another up-and-coming singer named Olivia Rodrigo, and as her career took off, Rowan got a stadium seat, backing Rodrigo on tour and providing backing vocals on her second album, Guts.

Most importantly, Negro used the momentum to sign Rowan to his record label and secure the release of her debut album in September 2023.

At first, it seemed that Rowan's original naming was correct. Sales were disappointing and audiences were slow to catch on because their strange, in-your-face anthems were out of keeping with the trend of whispery, confessional pop music.

But those songs came out on stage. It's big, fun and designed for audience engagement, and is taken to new heights thanks to Rowan's powerful voice and delightful stage persona.

“A drag queen doesn't go on stage to calm people down,” she says. “A drag queen doesn't say things to flatter people. A drag queen makes you blush, you know what I mean? Expect the same energy at my show.”

It was certainly her live appearance at last year's Coachella festival that catapulted her into the upper echelons of pop music.

Wearing a PVC crop top that read “Eat Me,” she played the packed Gobi tent like a headliner, strutting purposefully across the stage and coaching the audience in Hot To Go's campy choreography.

She then stared directly into the camera and dedicated a song to her ex.

“Bitch, I know you're watching… and all those terrible things happening to you are karma.”

The clip went viral, and soon her career did as well.

By summer, all of its offerings had been upgraded. Festivals continued to be moved to larger stages. When it played Lollapalooza in August, it attracted the largest daytime crowd at the event.

“It only takes a decade,” she says. “That's what I tell everyone. If you're OK with it taking 10 years, you're good to go.”

As fans discovered her debut album, Rowan also released a single – a satirical slice of pop called Good Luck Babe, which became a hit.

“I don't even know if I've ever said this in an interview, but it was originally called Good Luck, Jane,” she reveals.

“I wanted it to be about me falling in love with my best friend, and then her being like, 'Ha ha ha, I don't love you back, I love boys.'

“And it was like, 'Okay, well, good luck with that,' Jane“.”

One of the best works of folk storytelling, Good Luck Babe has a convenient three-act structure, with a killer payoff in the middle of the eight and a chorus you can't get away from.

However, Ruan was shocked by his success.

“I just threw it away, like I don't know what this is going to do — and it lasted all year!”

The question, of course, is what the star will do now that she's the voice of 2025.

She's already previewed two new songs, The Subway and The Giver, in concert – but all she'll reveal about the second album is that they're “more hesitant to be sad or dark”.

“It feels so good to celebrate,” she explains.

Looking back over the past 12 months, she's been thinking philosophically about what it means to be the hottest new commodity in pop music.

“A lot of people think that fame is the pinnacle of success, because what more could you want than adoration?”

Rowan admits that liking strangers is more “addictive” than she expected.

“Like, I understand why I'm so afraid of losing that feeling.

“It's very scary to think that one day people won't care about you the same way they do now — and I think (that idea) lives in women's brains much differently than in men's brains.”

Ultimately, I decided that success and failure were “outside my control.” Instead, you want to make good choices.

“If I can look back and say: I didn't collapse under the weight of expectations, and I didn't endure abuse or blackmail, (then) at least I stayed true to my heart,” she says.

“As I said before, there are always options.”

Chappelle Rowan has been named BBC Radio 1's Voice of the Year 2025, by a panel of more than 180 musicians, critics and music industry experts.

The top five places, in order: