Indie pop heads and casual listeners alike can find something to love in the music and artistry of Del Water Gap.
Samuel Holden Jaffe — better known by his artist persona Del Water Gap — started from humble beginnings. As a small-town kid from rural Connecticut, Jaffe began playing drums in a cover band at 13 years old. In an interview on DATE WITH TAIT, Jaffe explained that he was a shy, girl-crazy kid who would write songs and send them to his crushes on MySpace.
Jaffe’s early talent and drive for songwriting led him to the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University (NYU), where he studied music and sound production. It was there that he met Maggie Rogers, who would become one of the original members of Del Water Gap before Jaffe eventually took the project solo. Their most notable collaboration is “New Song” from her 2020 release Notes from the Archive. Written in 2013, the album is a gut-wrenching reflection on the existentialism of young love and features some of Jaffe’s most vivid, raw vocals in any part of his discography. The two still frequently collaborate, with Jaffe opening for Rogers on the European leg of her 2023 Surrender tour.
Since the beginning, Jaffe’s songwriting has been from the heart — an unfiltered expression of what he feels inside. Originally grounded in alternative folk, he has slowly moved through alt-pop into full indie pop/rock. He often cites dark rooms and romantic encounters as major inspirations for Del Water Gap’s sound. Remarkably, that comes through in the music: a somber, euphoric and cinematic haze that has become unmistakably his.
Listeners can trace Jaffe’s evolution across the decade that he’s been releasing under his pseudonym. His first single, “Lamplight,” sits firmly in alt-folk territory, reminiscent of The Lumineers or Mumford & Sons, but with a distinctly youthful innocence and a knack for nostalgia.
His transition into alt-pop becomes clearest on the 2017 single “High Tops” — a personal favourite — and the EP 1 (646) 943 2672, named after a burner phone. On “High Tops,” Jaffe channels that young boy writing songs for his crushes, singing about pulling someone out of turmoil: “I’ll throw you a rope / I’ll keep pulling you out.” He also pleads for his love interest to drop her bad habits just so they can have more time together. It’s a track soaked in imperfect youth and the vulnerability of longing. The EP sees Jaffe continue to hone his writing with ‘90s pop/rock scattered throughout.
Del Water Gap released one more EP, Don’t Get Dark (2019), before his debut LP. The EP marks Jaffe’s early shift into the “dark-room” indie-pop sound he’s become known for, especially on tracks like “Theory of Emotion” and “To Philly,” all while keeping some of the stripped-back, ’90s-leaning production carried across his earlier work.
Even if his name doesn’t ring a bell, his most popular track, “Ode to a Conversation Stuck in Your Throat” (2020), likely will. Upbeat and daring, it’s a song about impulse and risk, still grounded in the vulnerability that defines his writing: “I don’t want anybody else touching you like I do.” It earned him the wider acclaim that set the stage for his first LP.
His debut LP, Del Water Gap, saw Jaffe hit a sweet spot between indie rock and polished bedroom pop — jittery guitars, tight percussion and the confessional vocals he’d been honing for years. It’s an album about impulse: wanting too much, saying too little, running toward intimacy and flinching from it in the same breath.
The singles, especially “Sorry I Am” and “Better Than I Know Myself,” captured the pulse of the project right away: messy affection, self-doubt and sleepless nights. He lets the world see his uncertainty and fear while opening his heart and pouring out whatever he can.
Jaffe’s 2023 release, I Miss You Already + I Haven’t Left Yet, marked a sharpening of his sound. Gone is the scrappy, demo-like feel of the NYU days — IMYA+IHLY is warmer, looser and far more emotionally outward than the debut. It’s glazed in a kind of melancholy: indie pop dressed with soft-rock touches and the restless energy that he stretches across his best songs.
The 2024 deluxe deepened that vibe further, adding songs that feel like late-night confessionals — the kind you share after the party ends and only the people who truly matter are left in the room.
This project is punchy but vulnerable, built around anxiety, impulse and the friction of wanting love in the complicated world of the singer’s late 20s. It feels upbeat on the surface, but deeper lyrics hide beneath the glossy production.
His latest LP, Chasing the Chimera, finds Jaffe confronting single life for the first time in five years, longing for clarity and forgiveness while running on fumes from a year on tour opening for Niall Horan. It’s an album filled with self-hate, grasping for validation and searching for honesty even when truth threatens to unravel everything.
It is his most emotionally resonant record yet: introspective, bruised and brutally self-aware. In an email to fans, he explained that he dedicated songs to both his grandmother and his mother, weaving a portrait of a reluctant man with a guilt complex, caught somewhere between grandeur and contrition. Or, as he puts it: a romantic with a God problem, a boy with a woman’s heart and a man’s hunger, and a compulsive people-pleaser who fears he’s turning into a pathological liar.
Standout tracks include “Please Follow,” “Eastside Girls,” “Eagle in My Nest” and “Small Town Joan of Arc.” The album title comes from the idea of the chimera — the impossible dream, the unreachable ambition — which he discovered while watching La Chimera, by Italian director Alice Rohrwacher, in a weekly film club he shares with his grandmother.
Del Water Gap is an artist with a lot to say and even more promise. He has repeatedly proven that he is one of the most compelling writers of romance, grief and longing. His music may evoke names like Role Model, Somber, or The Wallows, but there’s an edge — a distinctive honesty — that’s entirely his own.
There’s no perfect place to start. Whether you’re stepping into a new love, navigating a turbulent chapter or simply looking for someone who gets it, Del Water Gap might just be the artist you’ve been searching for.
As Jaffe would say, “IN THIS WIDE AND PERILOUS ALL-TOO-BIG WORLD, DEL WATER GAP WOULD LIKE TO THANK YOU FOR BEING CLOSE.”