Del Water Gap - Chasing The Chimera (Album Review)
Thursday, 13 November 2025
Written by Jack Press
Photo: Anthony Wilson
On ‘Chasing The Chimera’, Brooklyn-based songwriter Samuel Holden Jaffe steps out from the indie-pop darkness of 2023’s ‘I Miss You Already + I Haven't Left Yet’ into warming, indie-folk sunlight. His third album as Del Water Gap trades moody, synth-driven atmospherics for strummed acoustics and jazz-inflected arrangements, navigating territory between Father John Misty’s baroque-pop wryness and Phoebe Bridgers’ emo-folk vulnerability.
Much like the music, the album’s title operates on two levels: the Greek mythological monster and illusory, unattainable hope. Jaffe chases both, pursuing impossible perfection while reconciling conflicting versions of himself. His lyrics, the sharpest of his career, transform romantic regret and moral ambiguity into lines that feel simultaneously personal and universal.
How To Live demonstrates this mastery: shimmering synths and strummed-out indie-folk explode into urgent, half-spoken anecdotes as Jaffe’s mind fights with itself: “I know too much / it’s freaking me out / but there's gold under the rust / figuring out just how to live.”
Elsewhere, Ghost In The Uniform poetically documents a Covid-era fling that’s somehow lasted five years, its impossibly catchy chorus defying its syllabic density.
Please Follow offers the album’s most ambitious moment: five minutes of funk-driven jazz-improv with cinematic strings and melodramatic saxophone that powerfully personifies the push and pull of Jaffe’s emotions.
Yet the album, like Jaffe’s thoughts, stumbles occasionally. Opener Marigolds lacks the gut-punch its lyrics deserve, while New Personality and We Don’t Have To Take It Slow need a little longer to fully develop their ideas — proof that Jaffe occasionally settles for good enough when he’s capable of exceptional.
‘Chasing The Chimera’ ultimately captures the complexity of its name — it’s evidence of a monstrous talent pursuing something transcendent. When Jaffe commits fully, and he does so more often than not, his mix of foundational indie-folk and polished indie-pop production is essential listening for existential millennials.
Del Water Gap Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Thu March 12 2026 - GLASGOW SWG3 Galvanizers
Sat March 14 2026 - MANCHESTER Manchester Academy
Sun March 15 2026 - BIRMINGHAM O2 Institute
Tue March 17 2026 - LONDON Roundhouse
Wed March 18 2026 - BRISTOL O2 Academy Bristol
Thu March 19 2026 - BRIGHTON Concorde 2
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