New York, NY · indie pop

Del Water Gap

1 upcoming festival

Heartthrob indie-pop — leather-jacket romanticism with pop craft, swooners engineered for the barricade and the long drive home.

Del Water Gap is the project of American songwriter S. Holden Jaffe, who has recorded under the name since the early 2010s. He began in New York and is often mentioned alongside Maggie Rogers, with whom he played in an earlier duo while both were students; the two have continued to collaborate occasionally.

The music sits between indie rock and pop, built on guitar and keyboard arrangements with a heavy emphasis on melody and on lyrics about desire, self-doubt and the wreckage of relationships. Jaffe's vocals tend toward the intimate and slightly frayed, and the songs are structured for singalongs without much irony. He has toured widely as a support act, which has helped build a devoted audience for the project's live shows.

indie pop