When Hank Heaven first met the producer Phil Weinrobe, in late October 2024, the songwriter ended the conversation with an offhand bit of small talk about the music they would soon make together. “I hope,” Hank said casually, “it sounds good.” Weinrobe had a reply at the ready: “If the songs are good, it will sound good.” Five months later, in March 2025, they reconvened at Sugar Mountain, the studio in Brooklyn where Weinrobe has made records for the likes of Big Thief, Billie Marten, and Tomberlin. He’d built a band of young New York ringers specifically for this session—drummer Sean Mullins, multi-instrumentalist Núria Graham, bassist El Kempner (of Palehound), guitarists Mike Helderman and Adam Brisbin among them. Days later, Welterweight, Hank’s third EP and debut for Nice Life Recording Company, was done. It doesn’t just sound good; it sounds like a breakthrough. Hank didn’t always consider themselves a songwriter. Only five years ago, they were a guitarist, so swept up as a kid in the sounds of Django Reinhardt that they toured the world with swing bands while still a teen. Hank soon became a guitarist for hire, with sessions and tours alongside pals like Samia and Del Water Gap. But those songwriters are now Hank’s peers: In late 2022, they released Call Me Hank, an endearing and infectious five-song EP about questions of identity they were then exploring. Two years later, Loaded Dice asked more questions about who Hank Heaven was—no, not just a young trans songwriter and guitarist, but a person confronting issues of obsession and addiction, of maybe being an asshole when they knew better.  Welterweight, though, feels like Hank Heaven’s proper arrival, not only as a songwriter of uncommon candor but also as a person learning what it means to navigate love and life. This is Hank, landing in their late 20s and sober and having fully changed their name and transitioned, slowly discovering what it means to build a sustainable relationship, what it means to long for someone, what it means to be longed for by someone. To wit, Hank is currently in the longest continual relationship of their life and is already deep into the next record, its songs about exactly that.  Let’s not, however, get too far ahead of ourselves, since Welterweight is a stunning point along Hank’s trip on its own, a real moment when you understand that the scenery has shifted in a fundamental way. If you heard Loaded Dice or Call Me Hank, you likely noticed the space Hank put between themself and their songs. Their voice was processed, the tunes often suffused with electronics and production techniques that broke narrative flow. But from the moment the sweet and salty love song “I Wanna Be Your Man” begins with Hank’s fingerpicked acoustic and unadorned voice, you will understand that this is different, because Hank was eager to let the tunes speak for themselves. In fact, Hank doesn’t play guitar at all on half of these tracks, a stunning development for someone who built their life around the instrument.  These very good songs are vivid snapshots of growing up, of staying afloat in the maelstrom of the feelings that finding or losing a partner can produce. This is a new classic New York City record, built on the bullshit and joys that come from trying to make it as a young artist in such a relentless place. Hank battles bad landlords and con artists, finds happiness in the crook of a lover’s body. The writing here feels scrappy and raw, the words of someone fending for themselves; the recordings—rendered by Weinrobe and this ad hoc band, no headphones, very little separation, very few overdubs—mirrors that sensibility, that survival. In less than half a decade, Hank has harnessed a Mountain Goats level of detail and a bit of Bill Callahan’s wry humor, buoyed by an effortless sense of melody. Take “Thread,” which finds Hank in the middle of an intense spat with their new love interest. The whole thing makes Hank question their sobriety and sanity, but they find relief in hearing “our song” in the club. When they walk down to the bodega for breakfast the next morning and the man behind the counter asks if Hank wants the usual large coffee with cream, they quiver—that’s their partner’s order, and they’re still not speaking. Or there’s that moment at the top of “Seinfeld” when seeing the poem on top of Oscar Wilde’s headstone (“For his mourners will be outcast men/And outcasts always mourn”) makes Hank regret the past but also turn to the future, for the chance they still have to fix things, to get better. Here is an entire New York coming-of-age tale, crystallized in a Parisian cemetery. If you talked to Hank four or maybe even two years ago, you would have sensed their confusion about their life and their work. Where were they headed? And how did these songs fit into that path? But if you talk to Hank now, you will sense only excitement. They’ve moved out of the hovel run by a landlord in prison (referenced during “I Wanna Be Your Man” and “Daddy’s Gonna Buy You a Car”), and they’ve got a legit partner in a legit place. They’ve had some exciting gigs on Broadway of late (Dead Outlaw, for one), and they’ve got some dizzying new band news in the offing. But you don’t even need to talk to Hank to sense this. You can hear that newfound gleam in these songs, as confident in the writing as they are in the execution. Good songs sound good, just like the man said. A brilliant snapshot of what it means and how it feels to grow up, Welterweight pulls no punches.