Hank Heaven never intended to be a songwriter. Raised in New York's Hudson Valley in a family of professional musicians, Hank emerged as something of a guitar wunderkind, enamored with and excelling in the swing music of yore. Django Reinhardt was a specialty. Still a teenager, they toured the world with jazz bands before moving to Brooklyn and becoming a guitarist for hire in the modern ranks of magnetic indie acts — Samia, Del Water Gap, and Gus Dapperton, just to sample. They were content with that career, too, locking into parts while sharpening their skills on high-stakes stages. Why would Hank need songs of their own?
But it never stays that simple. Early in 2022, Hippo Campus singer Jake Luppen co-produced the start of a new quartet called Peach Fuzz — Samia, Hank, Ryann, and Raffaella Meloni. Around that time, Luppen heard that Hank had melodic ideas and tuneful bits of their own, and he encouraged Hank to keep working, to develop these songs of their own. Hank did, soon heading to Minneapolis to hang out and write with Meloni and Luppen, by then his partner. They developed these songs in friendship. Call Me Hank — a charming and smart five-track EP, where an aching piano ballad about dejection shared room with sharp and hooky rejoinders about substandard partners — emerged only a year later. One of 2023's most promising EPs, those songs announced that Luppen and Meloni had been right: Hank had plenty to say, and they could also go anywhere, hopscotching from hyperpop to pop-country and from melancholy to mirth.
The evolution of Hank, both musically and personally, has since been brisk by necessity. In the first category, Hank has realized that they've essentially spent their whole life preparing to make guitar-based pop, and there's no need to betray that as they build Loaded Dice, the LP they're finishing as you read these words. All those other loves — torch songs, textural abstraction, electronic radiance — remain, but it's mostly folded into songs shaped by a guitarist so good that skill alone could have sustained them for a lifetime. You can clearly hear the licks of a classically trained and perennially sharp guitarist here, early inspiration recast as new fodder.