Chappell Roan can’t be stopped

What a difference a year makes. On Aug. 11, 2023, Chappell Roan released “Hot to Go!,” a cheerleader’s chant of a synth-pop bop — “like ‘Y.M.C.A.’ but gayer,” she said at the time — that heralded a soon-to-drop debut album by a young artist eager to break out after the disappointing collapse of an earlier record deal. “It’s hot as f—, b—.” The massive crowd inside Golden Gate Park was just the latest that Roan has gathered over the course of a festival season that kicked off with her viral appearance at April’s Coachella; since then, the 26-year-old has gone on to dominate New York’s Governors Ball, where she memorably dressed as the Statue of Liberty, and Chicago’s Lollapalooza, which said she played the largest daytime set in the show’s three-decade history. But only Roan was preceded to the stage by a miniature marching band that snaked across the festival grounds, trailing fans wearing pink cowboy hats as it pumped out a brassy rendition of “Hot to Go!” Indeed, for all the singer’s omnipresence on social media of late, Chappellmania — which actually got going just prior to Coachella when she toured as an opening act for Olivia Rodrigo — has played out as a distinctly live phenomenon in which people are longing to participate in person. As vigorously as she was moving, her vocals were gutsy and precise in “Femininomenon” and “Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl,” to name two of the insanely hooky, ’80s-coded jams from “Midwest Princess,” which the singer made with Rodrigo’s most trusted collaborator, producer Dan Nigro, in the wake of being dropped by Atlantic Records in 2020 and moving home to small-town Missouri from Los Angeles.