“The Subway” details the jittering adrenaline rush that comes with encountering an ex. “I was having a hard time getting over this one person, and I just could not get over them,” Roan says, as her glam team braids her hair and paints blooms of pink onto her cheeks. “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.”

The song, which Roan co-wrote with its producer, Daniel Nigro, proved an arduous creative undertaking. She compares “The Subway” to her early hit “Casual,” a song about wanting someone who won’t commit, both in terms of its content and the production process. “It took an annoying amount of time to just get it right,” she says.

The same was true of the music video. “I haven’t done a video in years because they’re so unnecessarily hard and sometimes traumatic,” she says. After releasing her singles “Good Luck, Babe!” in 2024 and “The Giver” earlier this year, Roan didn’t feel she had the time or the energy to create accompanying visuals. “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,” she says.