Del Water Gap is the recording name of Samuel Holden Jaffe, an American singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer born April 15, 1993, in Sharon, Connecticut, and now based in Brooklyn, New York. After a decade of self-released EPs and a near-total exit from music at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jaffe broke through in 2020 with the viral, later Gold-certified single “Ode to a Conversation Stuck in Your Throat,” went on to release two studio albums (Del Water Gap in 2021 and I Miss You Already + I Haven’t Left Yet in 2023) on Mom + Pop Music, and built one of the era’s more durable indie-pop songwriting partnerships with childhood-camp-friend-turned-NYU-classmate Maggie Rogers. His third album, Chasing the Chimera, arrived in November 2025.
Jaffe has described his childhood as happening “between two farms in the woods” in rural Connecticut, where his parents Joshua Jaffe and Katharine Holden both worked as doctors. His introduction to music came largely through his father’s record collection, heavy on Bob Dylan and Randy Newman, and his most enduring artistic influence was his grandmother, the only other artist in the family, who lived in Paris and worked for the Metropolitan Opera for decades. He attended Millbrook School, an athletic boarding school in Millbrook, New York, where, by his own account, he wasn’t good at sports, which pushed him toward music instead; he had already played drums for ten years by that point. At 16, in his sophomore year of high school, his first girlfriend, a jazz musician and songwriter, inspired him to start writing his own songs, and he later took part in a music program at Berklee College of Music.
The name itself dates to age 17: driving around New Jersey, Jaffe saw “Delaware Water Gap” handwritten in Sharpie on the back of a box truck and shortened it into a stage name. He has said he was drawn to how project names like Bon Iver and The Tallest Man on Earth gave their creators “removal” and “mystery,” and more room to build a world than performing under his own name would allow.
The Maggie Rogers connection that would shape much of Jaffe’s career runs deeper than a shared alma mater. The two first met at age 12, competing against each other at a summer sailing camp in Maine. They reconnected years later as classmates at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music inside the Tisch School of the Arts, where Jaffe had moved at 18 to study music and sound production, initially with the goal of becoming a sound engineer. At NYU he assembled a band under the Del Water Gap name, and Rogers played in that first, short-lived incarnation of the project for roughly six months alongside two other students before it dissolved and Jaffe carried the name forward alone. A 2013 student-newspaper piece from that era captured the group mid-formation, noting the two had “been working together for five months and touring for only two” as an “infantile” duo playing gigs around New York City.
Multiple outlets and fan communities have reported that Jaffe and Rogers also had a long-term romantic relationship following their college years, which several sources place at roughly five years, though neither artist has ever named the other publicly as a former partner. Concertgoers at Rogers’ 2023 stop at Radio City Music Hall on the Feral Joy Tour reported overhearing Rogers’ friend, actress Dianna Agron, describe Rogers as “touring with her boyfriend and his band,” widely interpreted as a reference to Jaffe and Del Water Gap serving as the opening act. This dating history remains unconfirmed by either artist directly and should be read as fan-sourced and press speculation rather than an on-the-record fact.
After the original band broke up near the end of Jaffe’s time at NYU, he pursued Del Water Gap as a solo project, playing regularly at now-vanished corners of the New York indie scene, including Arlene’s Grocery, Rockwood Music Hall, Pianos, and the since-closed Sullivan Hall, during what he has called “the tail end of that New York City indie-rock golden age.” He began playing shows in 2012 and released his first project, the self-titled Del Water Gap EP, that May. The Sleeping EP followed in May 2014.
In March 2017, Jaffe independently released 1 (646) 943 2672, an EP named after a burner phone number he gave to fans, which he personally answered when they called. The EP included “High Tops,” a track that later enjoyed a small viral moment on TikTok years after release, tying it stylistically to the late-2010s bedroom-pop wave associated with contemporaries like Rex Orange County. Signed briefly to Terrible Records, Jaffe released the single “Laid Down My Arms” in November 2018, followed in 2019 by “Chastain” and “Theory of Emotion” ahead of his third EP, Don’t Get Dark, released that April on the same label. That November he issued Alive From Fresno, a seven-track live EP that closed out the Terrible Records chapter of his catalog.
The turning point came in May 2020, in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, when Del Water Gap released “Ode to a Conversation Stuck in Your Throat” and “Mariposa” on Atlantic Records. Jaffe has been candid that this was a low ebb: he had parted ways with his management and record label, canceled a tour because of the pandemic, and was seriously weighing a pivot to become a Certified Public Accountant. In his own words to W Magazine, “the release had pretty much flopped,” and he had already started telling friends and peers he planned to leave music behind.
The song’s fortunes changed that July, when actresses Kaitlyn Dever and Margaret Qualley posted a split-screen video of themselves performing a “socially distant dance party” to the track on Instagram during pandemic lockdowns. The clip went viral, Del Water Gap joined the “virtual party” himself, and the moment was notable enough to be covered by Vogue. While the initial viral moment centered on Instagram rather than TikTok specifically, the song’s subsequent circulation across short-form video platforms, including TikTok, is widely credited with cementing it as a sleeper hit that introduced Jaffe to a mainstream audience.
The commercial impact was substantial and durable. W Magazine reported the song had reached 75 million Spotify streams within roughly a year of the viral moment, an inflection point that let Jaffe sign a new record deal and finish his debut album. By 2024, NYU’s alumni publication reported that “Ode to a Conversation Stuck in Your Throat” and “High Tops” had together garnered over 100 million streams on Spotify. As of mid-2026, streaming-tracking site Kworb listed the song at roughly 190 million total Spotify streams, still generating tens of thousands of daily streams years after release. In December 2024, the song was certified Gold by the Recording Industry Association of America for 500,000 certified units. It remains a fixture of Jaffe’s live sets and is frequently his show-closer, including on multiple legs of the Feral Joy Tour with Maggie Rogers, where he has introduced it from the Rogers stage as “a song about monogamy, and asking someone to only be yours.”
Del Water Gap released his self-titled debut studio album on October 8, 2021, via Mom + Pop Music, following a teaser EP called Alone Together that September. It arrived nearly a decade after his first EP and became his first true full-length project. The twelve-song record is built around themes of desire, jealousy, and adoration, and reviewers described it as suffused with “an honest sense of intimacy” and a “gut-wrenching pull” of lyricism layered over guitars, synths and percussion. One review called it “an enchanting cross-over between the soundscapes of Phoebe Bridgers and the delicate nature of Amber Run,” while praising “Perfume” as “background music for kissing.” Key tracks include “Ode to a Conversation Stuck in Your Throat,” “Alone Together,” “Perfume,” “Better Than I Know Myself,” “Hurting Kind,” and “Sorry I Am.” Jaffe toured internationally in support of the album across 2021 and 2022.
Jaffe’s sophomore album, I Miss You Already + I Haven’t Left Yet, was released on Mom + Pop Music on September 29, 2023, following an 18-month recording process spanning roughly 40 studio sessions. The title is drawn from an inscription Jaffe’s grandfather wrote to his grandmother inside a book of William Carlos Williams poetry, “I miss you already, and I haven’t left yet,” which Jaffe discovered after one of their regular movie nights. The album debuted at number 97 on the Top Album Sales chart.
The record leans into themes of liminality and transition: a relationship developing in hotel rooms on “All We Ever Do Is Talk,” the space between attraction and commitment on “Doll House” and “We Will Never Be Like Anybody Else,” and the disorientation of returning from tour on “Quilt of Steam,” co-written with and featuring Arlo Parks. Paste called it “an intimate record brimming with passion, energy and feeling” that navigates “madness, romance and self-reckoning,” noting Jaffe “sounds looser, freer and more like himself than ever before” despite tackling love, loss, sobriety and existential doubt. Producer Sammy Witte, known for work with Harry Styles and 5 Seconds of Summer’s Luke Hemmings, gave the record a more polished, pop-forward sheen relative to the debut, while longtime collaborator Gabe Goodman worked on “NFU,” a song closer in spirit to Jaffe’s earlier material. Featured guests included Clairo, who contributed clarinet, and Arlo Parks as co-writer and vocalist. A deluxe edition followed in 2024, adding tracks including “Purple Teeth, The Bravery” and “Cigarettes & Wine,” a duet with Holly Humberstone released in January 2024.
Jaffe’s third studio album, Chasing the Chimera, followed on November 7, 2025, making him a three-time Mom + Pop album artist. The 12-track, roughly 41-minute record has been described by critics as Jaffe’s “most cohesive and emotionally articulate album to date,” trading “sun-soaked windows-down anthems” for something “quieter, gentler, and more intimate,” built on warm synths, delicate percussion, and acoustic flourishes.
The album’s title stems from a 2025 Zoom conversation between Jaffe, his nearly-101-year-old grandmother Patricia, and actress Isabella Rossellini, a guest in the weekly film club Jaffe co-runs with his grandmother since the first week of COVID lockdown, about Alice Rohrwacher’s 2023 film La Chimera. Rossellini’s remark about learning “when to not be an artist” resonated with Jaffe amid tour burnout and shaped the album’s themes of chasing “impossible” ambitions and reconciling past and present selves.
Two days after the album’s release, Joe Jonas posted an Instagram cover of “How to Live,” which Jaffe called “one of the greatest honors as a songwriter.” On December 20, 2025, Jaffe appeared as a special guest during a Jonas Brothers concert at CFG Bank Arena on their Jonas20: Greetings from Your Hometown Tour, performing “How to Live” live with the band, a full-circle moment given that Jaffe was in high school during the Jonas Brothers’ initial breakthrough.
The Chasing the Chimera World Tour launched January 15, 2026, with a sold-out show at The Ritz in Raleigh, North Carolina, the first of 42 announced stops, with singer-songwriter Hannah Jadagu as the supporting act across North American dates. The tour continued through the U.S. and Canada before heading to Europe in March, including a UK run (Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, London’s Roundhouse, Bristol, and Brighton) and continental stops in Paris, Milan, Amsterdam, Vienna, Warsaw, Berlin, Cologne, and Copenhagen. Live dates continued into mid-2026, including a Governors Ball Music Festival set on June 6, 2026, at Flushing Meadows Corona Park, which one reviewer called “one of the unexpected favorites” of the festival’s opening day.
Del Water Gap’s sound has evolved across three distinct eras but remains anchored by an origin in stripped-down, singer-songwriter-based music, shaped by Jaffe’s early listening diet of Bob Dylan and Randy Newman and later by Iron & Wine, Fleet Foxes, and The Tallest Man on Earth. Jaffe has said he “was not a particularly good singer” early on and “couldn’t really play,” so he leaned on writing to distinguish the project, keeping recordings minimal, “a lot of vocal guitars,” before broadening his palette over time by studying pop production while assisting producer Mike Adubato after college.
His official artist bio describes the project as “inspired by romantic encounters and dimly lit rooms,” a phrase repeatedly cited across music press as shorthand for his aesthetic. Critics classify the overall project as indie pop, indie rock, alt-pop, and bedroom pop in overlapping combinations; one retrospective traced a clean arc “from alternative folk” through “alt-pop into full indie pop/rock,” with a “somber, euphoric and cinematic haze” as the throughline. Jaffe’s own genre self-description for the 2023 album was “existential, anthemic, shoegaze,” citing Bono as a listening touchstone while pushing his vocal range further than before.
Lyrically, Jaffe mines heartbreak, longing for stability, jealousy, sobriety, and the disorientation of touring life, typically rendered in a conversational, colloquial register rather than ornate imagery, a stylistic choice he has said lets him “not have to show too much” of himself even while writing intensely personal material. Visually and cinematically, French New Wave film, David Lynch, and transcendental meditation have shaped his recent music videos and photography.
Del Water Gap’s touring history illustrates a gradual climb from local New York support bills to global headline runs. Early tour credits as an opening act include a 2021 show with Mt. Joy at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, a 2021 date with Holly Humberstone at the Roxy Theatre, and the October 2021 MORE NOISE!!! tour with Jeremy Zucker. In 2022, he opened for Girl in Red on the Make It Go Quiet Tour and for Arlo Parks on the Collapsed in Sunbeams Tour.
The most significant support run came in 2023, when Jaffe served as the opening act on 13 shows of Maggie Rogers’ Feral Joy Tour in February and March, including stops at Radio City Music Hall, the Anthem in Washington, D.C., and arenas across the U.S. and Europe. Reviewers of these shows repeatedly noted the personal warmth between the two performers on stage. Jaffe has also said in interviews that he has “toured with Maggie Rogers a bit,” calling her “a good friend of mine.”
Jaffe has headlined his own tours behind each album: North American and UK/Europe dates for Del Water Gap in 2021–2022; North American dates for I Miss You Already + I Haven’t Left Yet in 2023, with UK and Europe dates in 2024; a 2025 AU/IE/UK run, including a sold-out show at Outernet London; and the 2026 Chasing the Chimera World Tour. In June 2024, Jaffe stepped up to arena-level support, opening for Niall Horan on The Show: Live on Tour, playing Madison Square Garden, the Kia Forum, and The O2 Arena, a run he later described as forging “a real friend and a real mentor” relationship with Horan over roughly three months of touring together. He also opened for Halsey’s For My Last Trick Tour in the summer of 2025. His festival résumé spans Firefly (2021), Governors Ball, Outside Lands and Lollapalooza (2022), Newport Folk Festival, Austin City Limits, and Splendour in the Grass (2023), All Things Go and Shaky Knees (2024), Lollapalooza and Reading & Leeds (2025), and a 2026 Governors Ball return.
Maggie Rogers is Del Water Gap’s most important and recurring musical collaborator outside his solo catalog. In 2020, Rogers released “New Song,” a track recorded with Jaffe back in 2014, on her compilation album Notes from the Archive: Recordings 2011–2016; the pair also appear together on “(Does It Feel Slow?)” from the same release. Their partnership deepened significantly on Rogers’ second studio album, Surrender (2022): Jaffe co-wrote and produced the singles “Want Want” and “Anywhere with You” alongside Rogers and star producer Kid Harpoon (Tom Hull, known for work with Harry Styles and Miley Cyrus). The two have performed “Want Want” live together, including a 2023 stop in Stockholm during Rogers’ European tour.
Beyond Rogers, Jaffe has built a substantial track record as a songwriter and producer for other artists. He worked with Claud (Claud Mintz) on the 2018 song “Never Meant to Call” as producer and songwriter, and later on the 2020 single “My Body,” which the pair released as a duet with a shared music video. His production and writing credits also include Johnny Orlando’s “everything i hate about you” (2022), Ella Jane’s “Thief” (2021), Chloe George’s “Peachi” (2021), Kristiane’s “Something to Miss” (2021), Zachary Knowles’ “life sentence” (2021), and Rebounder’s “Japanese Posters” (2020). On his own records, key featured collaborators include Arlo Parks, who co-wrote and sang on “Quilt of Steam” (with additional production from Ethan Gruska), Clairo on clarinet, and Holly Humberstone on the 2024 duet “Cigarettes & Wine.” Longtime collaborator Gabe Goodman has worked with Jaffe across multiple albums. His music has also attracted high-profile covers: Joe Jonas posted an Instagram Reel covering “How to Live” days after Chasing the Chimera’s release, and Gracie Abrams has covered one of his songs as well.
Del Water Gap also sits inside a dense, overlapping web of 2020s indie-pop and alt-pop artists who share labels, producers, tours and festival bills, a scene loosely including Los Angeles-based artist Wallice (Wallice Watanabe), signed to Dirty Hit. Ticketing listings for Del Water Gap’s March 2026 New Haven stop on the Chasing the Chimera World Tour list Wallice among “related artists,” indicating overlap in fanbase and possibly a local support appearance, though this should be read as a soft, scene-level connection rather than a confirmed sustained collaboration.
Del Water Gap’s label history moves through four distinct phases. His first three EPs, Del Water Gap EP (2012), Sleeping (2014), and 1 (646) 943 2672 (2017), were self-released. Between 2018 and 2019 he was signed to Terrible Records, which released “Laid Down My Arms,” “Chastain,” “Theory of Emotion,” and the Don’t Get Dark and Alive from Fresno EPs. In 2020, “Ode to a Conversation Stuck in Your Throat” and “Mariposa” were released via Atlantic Records.
Since 2021, Jaffe has recorded exclusively for Mom + Pop Music, the independent New York label that also houses artists such as Wallows, Courtney Barnett, Tegan and Sara, Caamp, Alice Merton, Beach Bunny, Magdalena Bay, and Sleigh Bells. The label has since entered a global partnership with Virgin Music Group to support growth for artists including MGMT, Caamp, Del Water Gap, and Magdalena Bay. Public booking-industry directories associate Del Water Gap with agency and management representation, though a single, confirmed, on-the-record management firm name for Jaffe has not surfaced in available reporting.
Del Water Gap’s now-ubiquitous “Horse with Bowl Cut” logo began as a joke: Jaffe drew a stick-figure horse with a bowl cut and a smiley face on a napkin at the Hungarian Pastry Shop near Columbia University in Morningside Heights, after a friend, illustrator Charlie Berg, caught him claiming he could draw. He listed the napkin on his merch store for $40; someone bought it immediately, and the character has since appeared as a 50-foot backdrop at festivals, a neon sign gifted by his label that tours with him, and, as of January 2026, a Catbird jewelry charm, joining past Catbird musician collaborators Clairo, Phoebe Bridgers, and Laufey, in what marked the brand’s first men’s jewelry line. He has also unsuccessfully tried to get the horse featured on Saturday Night Live.
At Governors Ball 2022, Yves Saint Laurent sent Jaffe a floral short suit to perform in, an experience he has said made him newly appreciate the role of fashion in live performance. He has recounted a raccoon breaking into his dressing room at Red Rocks Amphitheatre and eating an entire charcuterie spread before a show. Before his musical breakthrough, Jaffe worked odd jobs including teaching Photoshop classes to older adults. He co-runs a weekly movie-watching club over Zoom with his grandmother, who is nearly 101 years old; the club, which started the first week of the COVID-19 shutdown, has watched hundreds of films together and once hosted Isabella Rossellini as a guest. Jaffe ran the Los Angeles Marathon in the year before Chasing the Chimera’s release, part of a broader post-pandemic shift toward running and sobriety after a period of prescription drug problems roughly a decade earlier. Asked to describe his musical palette, Jaffe once answered with an elaborate cheese-plate metaphor: Trou du Cru, a truffle Moelleux des Alpes, a hard Beaufort, honey, jam, olives, and “those really expensive fig crackers they have at Whole Foods.”
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1993 | Samuel Holden Jaffe born in Sharon, Connecticut. |
| 2005 | Meets Maggie Rogers at age 12 at a sailing camp in Maine. |
| 2011 | Enrolls at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute; reconnects with Rogers, who joins the first Del Water Gap lineup. |
| 2012 | Self-titled Del Water Gap EP released; solo era begins after the original band dissolves. |
| 2014 | Sleeping EP released. |
| 2017 | 1 (646) 943 2672 EP released, including “High Tops.” |
| 2018–2019 | Signed to Terrible Records; releases “Laid Down My Arms,” Don’t Get Dark, and Alive From Fresno. |
| 2020 | “Ode to a Conversation Stuck in Your Throat” released on Atlantic Records, then goes viral via Kaitlyn Dever and Margaret Qualley’s Instagram video. |
| 2021 | Signs to Mom + Pop Music; releases debut album Del Water Gap. |
| 2022 | Co-writes and produces “Want Want” and “Anywhere with You” on Maggie Rogers’ Surrender; performs Governors Ball in a custom Yves Saint Laurent stage suit. |
| 2023 | Opens 13 dates on Maggie Rogers’ Feral Joy Tour; releases sophomore album I Miss You Already + I Haven’t Left Yet. |
| 2024 | Releases “Cigarettes & Wine” with Holly Humberstone and a deluxe edition of his second album; opens arena dates for Niall Horan. |
| 2024 (Dec) | “Ode to a Conversation Stuck in Your Throat” certified Gold by the RIAA. |
| 2025 | Opens for Halsey’s For My Last Trick Tour; announces and releases third album Chasing the Chimera. |
| 2025 (Dec) | Guests with the Jonas Brothers at CFG Bank Arena, performing “How to Live.” |
| 2026 | Launches the Chasing the Chimera World Tour; partners with Catbird on a jewelry charm; plays Governors Ball. |
Del Water Gap began as a short-lived band Jaffe assembled at NYU, which included Maggie Rogers for about six months, but has functioned as Jaffe’s solo recording project since that lineup dissolved in the early 2010s.
Multiple entertainment outlets and fan communities have reported that the two had a long-term relationship, often cited at around five years, following their college years. Neither Jaffe nor Rogers has confirmed this on the record, and it should be treated as unverified speculation rather than a confirmed fact.
“Ode to a Conversation Stuck in Your Throat,” originally released in 2020 on Atlantic Records. It went viral that summer via a socially-distanced dance video from actresses Kaitlyn Dever and Margaret Qualley, was certified Gold by the RIAA in December 2024, and had accumulated roughly 190 million Spotify streams as of mid-2026.
It began as a joke drawing on a napkin at a Manhattan cafe near Columbia University, made on a dare after a friend caught Jaffe claiming he could draw. He sold the original napkin for $40, and the character has since become the project’s signature visual, appearing on festival backdrops, a touring neon sign, and a 2026 Catbird jewelry collaboration.
Since 2021 he has released music exclusively through Mom + Pop Music, an independent label also home to acts including Wallows, Courtney Barnett, and Magdalena Bay. He was previously signed to Atlantic Records (2020) and, before that, Terrible Records (2018–2019).
| Metric | Figure | As of |
|---|---|---|
| “Ode to a Conversation Stuck in Your Throat” Spotify streams (early estimate) | ~75 million | 2021 |
| “Ode” + “High Tops” combined Spotify streams | 100+ million | 2024 |
| “Ode to a Conversation Stuck in Your Throat” RIAA certification | Gold (500,000 units) | December 2024 |
| “Ode to a Conversation Stuck in Your Throat” total Spotify streams | ~190 million | mid-2026 (Kworb) |
| I Miss You Already + I Haven’t Left Yet chart debut | No. 97, Top Album Sales | 2023 |
| Year | Release | Type | Label |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | Del Water Gap EP | EP | Self-released |
| 2014 | Sleeping | EP | Self-released |
| 2017 | 1 (646) 943 2672 | EP | Self-released |
| 2019 | Don’t Get Dark | EP | Terrible Records |
| 2019 | Alive From Fresno | Live EP | Terrible Records |
| 2021 | Alone Together | EP | Mom + Pop Music |
| 2021 | Del Water Gap | Studio album | Mom + Pop Music |
| 2023 | I Miss You Already + I Haven’t Left Yet | Studio album | Mom + Pop Music |
| 2024 | I Miss You Already + I Haven’t Left Yet (Deluxe) | Deluxe reissue | Mom + Pop Music |
| 2025 | Chasing the Chimera | Studio album | Mom + Pop Music |
Further reading: Del Water Gap’s catalog and touring history intersect with a wider circle of 2020s indie-pop and singer-songwriter acts, including Maggie Rogers, Claud, Arlo Parks, and Holly Humberstone, all frequent collaborators or tourmates across the past decade of his career.