The Friday Dispatch
Hank Heaven, ionnalee, Ray Suen, Lubalin, and this year's Found Sounds picks
Hank Heaven is building the next wave of indie-pop
A one-time jazz guitar prodigy born in Cold Spring, NY to a family of professional musicians, Hank Heaven is proving themselves one to watch with their debut LP, Loaded Dice. Moving to New York City after high school to pursue life as a guitarist, Heaven eventually met a young Samia, who was quickly rising in the indie scene. Meeting her, Heaven says, “led into everything else, basically.” Their friendship quickly led to an offer for Heaven to jump over to Samia’s touring band, through which they got connected to Jake Luppen and Raffaella, now their best friends and closest collaborators.
“Jake was like, ‘You know, if you ever want to record your stuff, you should come to Minnesota,’” Heaven says. It took Heaven a minute to take him up on it, but eventually, they did. “I always wrote songs and love writing songs. But it wasn’t until I really went to Minnesota and hung out with Jake and Raffaella and sat down and we produced out that first EP [Call Me Hank] that I was like, ‘It’s fun to sing and to write and I want to write more,’” they explain.
The creation of Hank Heaven changed their identity in more ways than one. At the start of the project, when the trio first were messing around with the 2022 EP Call Me Hank, they went by a different name. Hank Heaven was just – and still, to a degree, is – a character through which they could explore parts of themselves that they had been shying away from before. One to hide their emotions behind humor, songwriting brought to the surface things that Heaven knew they couldn’t put aside any longer.
“I made up that character and would say: ‘I’m Hank. I’m just a guy trying to be this really secure kind of person.’ It was a way to show up and present this masculine side,” they said. “But showing up with that and living with that, you’re like: ‘Actually, I am that kind of person. I’m nonbinary. I’m trans.’”
ionnalee on her song “down by the lake (KRONOLOGI version)”
We had a ten-year anniversary tour booked under the name ‘KRONOLOGI’, with the flights and some of the accommodation already paid for, so we were kind of panicking as the pandemic hit. But we soon realised that there was nothing we could do but stay home. I had just bought an old, rusty cabin from 1841 so I stayed there and worked on the songs. It was, by far, one of the calmest periods of my life.
“down by the lake” was written back in 2009, together with “y”, which was called “little hope” at the time, and a few other songs that I have. There is a demo somewhere of that song that, in my head at least, is really lovely, with kind of a tropical vibe to it. The version that I recorded for KRONOLOGI is much more straightforward pop, but it’s a lovely track too.
I wrote this song after watching a French movie called Ne le dis à personne, or Tell No One in English, but it didn’t feel like it belonged to the iamamiwhoami project because it had its own little story. I felt like I couldn’t go anywhere with it, and I couldn’t just rewrite the lyrics to fit the project, so I just had it sitting around. I actually have another song that I wrote based on that film, “Lake Chermain”, from one of my singer/songwriter albums
When “down by the lake” came out [as the third weekly instalment from KRONOLOGI], it seemed to be really loved by the fans, and I do think it deserves to have more of a life.
Ray Suen on Robert Palmer
One of my more persistent teenage memories is of watching VH1 in the late ‘90s and rolling my eyes at its insistence that I should pay deep reverence to the music videos of a-ha, Genesis, Madonna, Aerosmith and, god help me, the fucking Buggles. With every countdown of the “most important music videos of all time” I learned to despise the style, the synths, the sights and sounds of the ‘80s. And none of those countdowns seemed to ever be complete without Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love” with its empty sentiment and even emptier stares of the models pantomiming as a band in the video. In my youthful intransigence, I opted to pretend like he never even existed.
Imagine my surprise, some twenty years later, when I found myself frantically stopping to see what brilliant new wave gem had been recommended to me by some useful little algorithm only to discover that it was the same empty man singing about the domestic ennui of Johnny and Mary. Listening to Robert Palmer’s take on New Wave on his 1980 album Clues left me wondering if I actually knew anything about the genre at all. Something about the specific balance of shine and grit, atmosphere and airlessness and, not least of all, Palmer’s clearly virtuosic but coolly removed vocal has left me re-examining his influence, if any, on the music that followed the rest of the decade.
I’m still making my way through my Robert Palmer reappraisal journey. Reading about the sessions for his first album, Sneakin' Sally Through the Alley has endeared him to me even further. Any number of times throughout my career have I felt what I imagine to be the same nervousness about being around legendary musicians (in his case The Meters and the members of Stuff) and learning to love the music from a culture not intrinsically my own, the way Palmer did listening to American Forces Radio as a child growing up on naval bases. But as I continue on, I keep returning to Clues and wondering if it was some kind of inflection point that never was, if it was the world’s loss that it seemed to prefer the certainty of being addicted to love.
Stream Ray Suen’s score for The Thicket
The introduction
Meet Lubalin, the Internet’s pop-electronica obsession
Name… Lubalin
Age… 34
Hometown… Montreal, QC
Describe your sound… Pop-leaning drum & bass influences, 2000s-era electro-pop, indie, and alt. rock
How you started making music… When I was a kid, there was a guitar in my room. One day I noticed it and picked it up. Someone taught me to play smoke on the water. I went from there. I also had a playskool cassette recorder that I think got me into recording and production without realizing it. And I made my first beats on an SNES game called Mario Paint.
Your Montreal undiscovered gem… Dorchester Square park for people / pigeon watching.
Your most-visited site on the Internet… The YouTube homepage. I don’t watch anything I just scroll the thumbnails.
Lubalin’s latest album, haha, no worries, is out now.
Found Sounds: What the artists you love were loving this year
Crate-digging into the cannon of music history, we asked some of our favourite artists – including Chanel Beads, Lip Critic, Medium Build, Hinds, Benefits and Hinako Omori – to tell us about the music that found its way into their hearts this year – from Pentangle, Scritti Politti and Robert Palmer, to Freddie Mercury, Crowbar and Tammy Wynette.
The full list is available now on Best Fit, and we’ve made a playlist of accompanied listening that you can use to follow along with.
“By the way, I did not sleep with your ex-husband.”