We’re excited to introduce Hank Heaven, a Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter and guitarist newly represented by Secret Road. Hank’s new EP Welterweight, out today via Nice Life Recording Company, is a raw, intimate six-song collection built around live instrumentation, sharply specific storytelling, and a wry sense of humor. Produced by Phil Weinrobe (Adrianne Lenker, Big Thief, Billie Marten), the EP has already drawn praise from Stereogum, Rolling Stone and Them, with Stereogum calling Hank’s songwriting “vulnerable without being showy about it” and praising the “nice contrast between the stately arrangement and Heaven’s dazed drawl.”

Welterweight captures the intimacy of Hank, the person, and Hank, the artist, with an alignment of life and craft that is reflective and thoughtful. The EP chronicles a journey of self-discovery in a city that’s relentlessly challenging, battling negligent landlords, con artists and rocky relationships. Going into this EP, Hank embraced simplicity – getting sober, ridding their apartment of a TV and installing an alarm clock that forced them to do pushups to turn it off. Silencing that outside noise, along with transitioning and fully changing their name, led Hank to writing pointed, scrappy and slyly humorous snapshots and observations of the 28-year-old’s life to-date. They balance writing pained reflections of mistakes, missed opportunities and lost love like an Orwellian memoir, coming out on the other side having survived, with a gleaming optimism for the future.

"I wrote Welterweight while living in my friend’s Brooklyn studio apartment. No heat, no gas, and a shared bathroom with a neighbor who’d been at January 6th. Because of all that, the rent was free. It felt oddly similar to a time that doesn’t exist in New York City anymore, when musicians and artists lived cheaply and were constantly inspired by harsh conditions. It made feelings of loneliness and love so much heavier.

I felt more.

I named the EP Welterweight because that year felt like a constant match between me and whatever I needed, whether that was a physical thing, a person, or a purpose."

- Hank Heaven