Del Water Gap Makes a Muse from the Mirage of Modern Desire on 'Chasing the Chimera': Album Review
- Abby Anderson
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
Stand-out tracks: "How To Live" "Please Follow" "Eagle in My Nest"
Our favorites: "Marigolds" "Eastside Girls" "New Personality"
Release date: November 7, 2025
Label: Mom+Pop
For fans of: The 1975, Luke Hemmings, Harry Styles
A fire-breathing female monster. An illusion of hope. A dark, horrible, all-consuming fantasy, devoid of any trace of reality. No matter what definition of "chimera" Del Water Gap intended with the title of his third studio album, Chasing the Chimera, the project stunningly explores the intimacies and complexities of being faced with desire, humanity, and reverie in a world that feels like its sole purpose is to strip those things away. Released November 7 via Mom+Pop, this is music that goes layers deep in a quest through heaven and hell for personal understanding, hiding behind a dazzling instrumental production that makes S. Holden Jaffe's stage name one that rises as one of the most eloquent geniuses in alt-rock.
Chimera moves through sonic and lyrical phrases, flipping through pages of emotional turmoil and peeling away layers of the pain of unrealistic dreams the deeper Jaffe falls into them. "How to Live" is the cornerstone of the record that makes the lighter-hearted introductions of "Marigolds" and "Small Town Joan of Arc" feel like a foolish alternate reality. "Small Town Joan of Arc" sees the lightness in love, dipping a toe in Americana-influenced production to illustrate the groundedness of falling in love with a "small town girl," before "How to Live" turns that stability into nothing more than a temporary escape; "And I always play the victim / Though I’ll tell myself I don’t / Mister casual and flippant / He’s ashamed to be alone / And I’m no stranger to the distance / But I’m missing her bad / And I’m up at night and wishing / It could be simple as that."
Del Water Gap is based in New York City, and the city's glimmering, electrifying haze floats through the album's core, with the raw instrumentation of drums, pianos, horns, and synths crossing lines across the desperately non-committal yearning of the masterpiece that is "Please Follow" and the laid-back moonlit jazz-influenced "Eastside Girls," where Jaffe seems to be breaking his own heart, leaning his head out a Brooklyn brownstone window, wishing that he wasn't finding himself "All on my own on this journey that should have been ours." And whether Jaffe's muse is the city that drowns it all out or the closeness of the feelings he finds in strangers and lovers alike, "New Personality" twinkles with smooth desire and a dreamy instrumental outro that turns the page to the next phase of Del Water Gap's foolish search for spontaneous affinity.
Though that dream disappears as Jaffe snaps back to cruel reality, spinning a tale of flippant, arms-length connection laced in danger: "Call me when your arms are finally open again / When you’re hot and feeling bored / I’ll waste our time, a blind man leading the blind / In peace and off to war." He continues to seep in loves that are doomed from the start, singing "You’re not the one I need / Though I’m sorry to say it" in "Waiting on the Day" and losing himself in the frozen mirage of memories of a love that won't move forward on "Ghost in the Uniform."
But as Chasing the Chimera reaches its conclusion, Jaffe finally lets go, accepting the hand he's been dealt as the only path forward. He can embrace the intimacy of emotion or let it drown in the life he's created; "Damn" sees him letting his own uncertainty be his undoing: "It’s a tiny little promise / When the morning starts to break / But you feel sick to your stomach anyway / That’s what it’s like to be free." And "Eagle in My Nest" rolls the credits on this tale of searching for something that can never truly be found, lacing echoes of the album's production over its oxymoronic hopeful melancholia as Jaffe leaves this quest behind with one final juncture: "I know I’ll be alright in the end."
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