Fresh off her spot opening for Olivia Rodrigo, Chappell Roan is back with her first single since last year's The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. "Good Luck, Babe!" is a more realized version of her baroque pop vision, both airy and devastating in its delivery.
Roan has a knack for detailing situationships in that immediate way where any falter is catastrophic. "Good Luck, Babe!" levels up her faux nostalgia for those crushes where it hurts so much it's almost fun. It magnifies the frenzy without being a downer, all while pulling from a peculiarly deep fountain. The track begins with an early new wave synth line before dissolving into a power ballad, taking as much from Soft Cell as it does MARINA — a favourite influence of Roan's contemporaries.
It all sums up into the most genuine approach to the renaissance imagery alt-pop is offering right now. As the song climaxes with "When you wake up next to him in the middle of the night / With your head in your hands, you're nothing more than his wife," it's not the husband you see. It's the canopy draping above the bed, the estate in which they live. This man isn't even a tertiary character, keeping tight Roan's yearning for a cold, calculated woman. "You'd have to stop the world just to stop the feeling," she howls, but there's a small part of her that would rather the globe keep spinning — if only for the lore of it all.