Eventually, one of her compositions, a gothic ballad called Die Young, caught the attention of Atlantic Records, which signed her at the age of just 17.
Moving to LA, she recorded and released her first EP, School Nights, in 2017. It was a solid but unremarkable affair, steeped in the sounds of Lana Del Rey and Lorde.
Roan only found a sound of her own when a group of gay friends took her to a drag bar.
“I walked into that 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 go-go dancers! I was enthralled. I couldn’t stop watching them. I was like, ‘I have to do that’.”
She didn’t become a dancer, but she did write a song imagining what it would be like to be one and how her mother would react. Roan called it Pink Pony Club after a strip bar in her home town.
“That song changed everything,” she says. “It put me in a new category.
“I never thought I could actually be a ‘pop star girl’ and Pink Pony forced me into that.”
Her label disagreed. They refused to release Pink Pony Club for two years. Shortly after they relented, Roan was dropped in a round of pandemic-era cost-cutting.
