A friend moving to Paris handed Hank Heaven the keys to their apartment for free, but with plenty of strings attached: the landlord was in jail, there was a minor gas leak, the bathroom had to be shared with a "very much a character" neighbor, and on top of it all, they had to look after two blind cats. This absurd living situation became the basis for "I Wanna Be Your Man" on Hank's new EP, Welterweight. "You're going through heartbreak and the rollercoaster of life while living in this ridiculously funny place," they said.
Welterweight drops August 14th with six tracks, marking the record Hank Heaven has delivered after a full decade of living in New York. They have a theory about the city: "If New York wants to keep you, it'll keep you." Meaning even when you're scraping the bottom, something always seems to swoop in at the last second to save you. That almost-religious conviction underpins the whole EP, told through acoustic and electric guitar stories about New York.
Hank grew up in the Hudson Valley and started out as a jazz guitar prodigy, digging into Django Reinhardt-style swing playing from the 1930s back in high school, and even studied abroad. After graduating, they came back to New York and worked as an old-school session player, "playing a lot of weddings." It was only after meeting Samia, Claud, Del Water Gap, and other indie artists who were just starting out at the time and are now firmly established, that Hank realized what they actually wanted was to "be in a band, moved by songs and the people writing them." The shift from technically intricate jazz to indie rock was, in some ways, about wanting to take it easy: "I just wanted to relax," they laugh, thinking back to the days of rapid-fire jazz guitar picking.
That plainspoken but precise writing style comes through most clearly on the rock track "Thread." It's a breakup song, but it loads its punches into the most mundane images: "When the deli guy asks if I want milk in my large coffee, because that's how I used to order for you." The final two words, "for you," get flung skyward in a near-villainous howl. Another track, "Daddy's Gonna Buy You A Car," sounds like an old-school blues tune that could've been written in any era, but the premise is very 2026: a "struggling" New York musician who's actually got steady financial backing from family.
Before this, Hank released Call Me Hank in 2022 and Loaded Dice in 2024, both carrying a mocking, ironic edge with heavy Auto-Tune. Welterweight strips away that packaging, landing somewhere rawer and more sincere, though it keeps the dark humor intact, like the stream-of-consciousness mumbling on "Hank Heaven's 113th Wet Dream," which sings about the nervousness right before things get real with a crush: "Faking confidence works, until you actually have to show and tell."
After years of touring, Hank is now shifting focus back to their own work, which also means less time spent backing other artists on the road. Switching from the resources and scale of big venues back to the pace of running your own independent music is an adjustment. "It's a very slow process," they said, "but every little piece of it is satisfying."
