A few days ago, Shaffer unveiled Patience’s final single, “Anyone,” a song that glows with optimism and self-assurance. “Most of my music reflects indecision, fantasy, conflict, obsession with elsewhere…I really live in that limbo,” she explains. “‘Anyone’ is like the antithesis of all that. It’s me saying, I know exactly what I want this time and nobody can stop me.” The track’s warmth and hopefulness are tempered with a touch of melancholy — “It actually breaks my heart to listen to, because nothing is permanent. It makes me think about the way the sky turns sort of yellow and glows really beautifully right before a storm.”

The song’s sense of lightness is heightened by Lucy Liyou’s graceful piano work. “I can’t really talk about this song without mentioning Lucy,” Shaffer adds. “I think this song especially is totally transformed by her presence. The piano adds a sort of ecstatic levity to the melody that is so perfect.”

On Patience, Devin Shaffer leads a group of gifted collaborators for the first time, including Liyou on piano, Sarah Galdes on drums, Marilu Donovan on harp, and Mari Rubio on pedal steel, through a collection of delicate, introspective folk songs that search for peace in the unknown. It’s her most grounded and confident work to date, yet still full of wonder and emotional depth.

To celebrate the release, Devin Shaffer will perform with a full band for the first time ever on December 5 at The Hancock in New York City, joined by Alice Does Computer Music and Cassandra Croft. In the meantime, stream Patience below.

Her new single “I Guess I’m Crawling” captures the essence of that vision. It serves as the core of Patience, distilling the album’s spirit into one fragile yet determined song. Shaffer keeps the arrangement spare, her guitar steady and her vocals hushed, as if she were singing directly to the listener. The lyrics move through weariness and self-doubt, climbing uphill with a “broken body” and sinking into a “quicksand bed,” yet they return to something gentler. “In a way, ‘I Guess I’m Crawling’ is the ethos of the record,” she says. “It is a surrender to the pace at which things move, a surrender to all the setbacks, limitations, and diversions that have led me to where I am now.” By the final lines, she finds solace in yielding rather than pushing forward: “I guess I lay down by the pond. Joy in music all night long. I guess I’m crawling.” The accompanying video, pieced together from grainy Super 8 footage of her studio sessions in Chicago and at La Frette in France, mirrors that same quiet vulnerability. Simple moments are stitched into something enduring.

“I Guess I’m Crawling” follows the gorgeous “All My Dreams Are Coming True,” and both tracks preview Devin Shaffer’s first studio album, Patience, due out November 7, 2025. Written between 2021 and 2023, the album traces life’s uncertainties with quiet strength. An invitation to listeners to find peace in the unknowing.

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Now, Shaffer has officially announced her second studio album, Patience, out November 7 via American Dreams. Written between 2021 and 2023 during her move from Chicago to New York, the record explores uncertainty and surrender as guiding principles. “I keep thinking about this idea that once you think you’re on the path, you’ve lost the path,” Shaffer says. “There is no certainty, there is no knowing. It’s all about surrender.” For the first time, she also leads a full group of instrumentalists: Lucy Liyou on piano, Sarah Galdes on drums, Marilu Donovan on harp, and Mari Rubio on pedal steel, through arrangements that balance her tender guitar and voice with rich, shimmering layers. Both vulnerable and assured, Patience encourages listeners to find comfort in change rather than resist it.

The album’s lead single, “All My Dreams Are Coming True,” offers the first glimpse into that vision, dreamy, tender, and slightly sarcastic as one could wish. Alongside the song, Shaffer released a visualizer filmed by Kim Upstill, Marilu Donovan, and Shaffer herself, an understated but evocative companion to a track that sets the stage for Patience.

As her mini Bandcamp bio indicates, Devin Shaffer‘s ambient dreamscapes are hovering above Chicago. With the release of her forthcoming debut record, we bet her misty distilling of folk and ambient music will spread a bit further than the Mud City. In My Dreams I’m There was conceived like a diary, relating a personal journey from a place of fear and hesitance to acceptance and beauty.

If Shaffer‘s approach is definitely forward-thinking, with the use of synths and field recordings, the first single, “Enemy,” follows a more straightforward folk scheme. A highlight of her live set for years, it’s an ethereal in sound but dark in content song about jealousy and relationship, as she lulls that she is her own enemy. “It’s strange to have a song you’ve played live for years with voice and guitar become a bigger song with new elements,” she stated. “You’re like, ‘this isn’t what’s been playing in my head the whole time,’ and so you get used to the new versions, which now I’m really in love with.”

“Enemy” comes with a Carl Solether-directed video. Watch and pre-order the album via Bandcamp below.