In the spring of 2020, Samuel Holden Jaffe was telling friends he was done. His management had dropped him, his label deal had lapsed, a tour was canceled by the pandemic, and he had started looking seriously into becoming a Certified Public Accountant. Then, in May of that year, he released a song called "Ode to a Conversation Stuck in Your Throat" under his stage name, Del Water Gap. By his own account, it flopped.
The Burner Phone Years
Jaffe had already spent nearly a decade building the project in obscurity. He started playing shows in 2012 while at NYU, working the last gasp of what he calls "the tail end of that New York City indie-rock golden age" at venues like Arlene's Grocery and Rockwood Music Hall. In 2017 he released an EP titled 1 (646) 943 2672, named for a burner phone number he gave to fans and personally answered when they called. A brief stint on Terrible Records produced a handful of singles and the 2019 EP Don't Get Dark before that chapter closed with a live record, Alive From Fresno. None of it broke through in any commercial sense. By 2020 he had signed to Atlantic, released two songs, and watched them land with barely a ripple.
Dever, Qualley, and a Split Screen
The turn came that July, when actresses Kaitlyn Dever and Margaret Qualley posted a split-screen "socially distant dance party" video set to the song on Instagram. It went viral fast enough that Vogue covered the moment, and Jaffe himself joined the virtual party online. What had been a quiet release six weeks earlier was suddenly circulating across Instagram and then TikTok, introducing an artist who'd nearly walked away to an audience that had no idea he'd been at it since 2012.
The release had pretty much flopped.Samuel Holden Jaffe, W Magazine
The Long Tail
What happened next is the part that separates a viral moment from a career. W Magazine reported the song had reached 75 million Spotify streams within roughly a year of the Dever-Qualley video, enough momentum for Jaffe to sign a new deal and finish a debut album. By 2024, NYU's alumni publication put the combined streams of "Ode" and the earlier deep cut "High Tops" past 100 million. The song kept climbing long after its cultural moment passed: as of 2026-07, streaming tracker Kworb listed it at roughly 190 million total Spotify streams, still pulling tens of thousands of plays a day.
A song he'd already given up on became the thing that kept him in the room.
Building the Catalog Around It
The debt the song bought him funded a real discography. Del Water Gap, the self-titled debut, arrived on Mom + Pop Music in October 2021, an intimate twelve-track record built around desire and jealousy, with "Perfume" earning a review as "background music for kissing." The follow-up, I Miss You Already + I Haven't Left Yet, came in September 2023 after roughly 40 studio sessions, its title lifted from an inscription Jaffe's grandfather once wrote his grandmother. That record brought in guests including Clairo on clarinet and Arlo Parks as co-writer, and producer Sammy Witte, known for work with Harry Styles, gave it a more polished pop sheen than the debut.
Still Closing the Set
"Ode" never left the live show. It remains Jaffe's most reliable show-closer, including on multiple legs of the Feral Joy Tour supporting Maggie Rogers, his NYU classmate and childhood camp friend, where he introduces it from the stage as "a song about monogamy, and asking someone to only be yours." That the song still lands that way, six years and two albums removed from a near-exit from music, says something about how a single unplanned viral clip can outlast the moment that made it. Jaffe's third album, Chasing the Chimera, arrived in November 2025, and the accompanying world tour that followed, from a sold-out January stop in Raleigh through a Governors Ball set in June 2026, was built by an artist who, in 2020, had already started saying goodbye.