Alt-pop solo artist Del Water Gap releases “Coping On Unemployment,” the second single off his upcoming sophomore LP I Miss You Already + I Haven’t Left Yet. The track is a masterclass in confessional lyricism and the spar of being in love in the modern age. Pulling inspiration from David Lynch’s Mullholand Drive to Lydia Yuknavich’s Chronology of Water, Del Water Gap fuses raw, unfiltered lyrics and lush melodies with a pop-rock bend. The track follows “All We Ever Do Is Talk,” which was named a Song You Need To Know by Rolling Stone, with Paste referring to it as “replete with dreamy, electric guitars and full-bodied harmonics.”
“Coping On Unemployment” comes with a video including a lo-fi mashup of clips of Del Water Gap in hotel rooms and on stage from his last year of touring and recording the upcoming album.
Of the release, Del Water Gap says, “‘Coping on Unemployment;’ is a song about navigating the floaty salt-water bath feeling of post-Covid life in your mid-twenties. It’s about the liminal space between sex and commitment. It’s about fear of permanence, self-doubt, mental health, and the challenges of maintaining a meaningful relationship when you’re still learning who you are. It’s about how hard it is to just give in and allow yourself to belong to someone when you’re constantly terrified of becoming a parody of yourself. This song is about sleeping late and fucking and listening to indie music - the life that happens between life, when you’re waiting for real life to happen. This song is about how drugs and sobriety change the way we make art, and how our culture puts the artist’s suffering on a pedestal. I used to worry that if I got sober or medicated I wouldn’t be a good artist anymore.”
Soon, Del Water Gap will embark on a headline tour that features some of his biggest shows to date including NYC’s Brooklyn Steel, LA’s The Fonda and Austin City Limits in Texas; recently he played his first ever set at Australia’s Splendour In The Grass.