Hannah Cohen - Welcome Home (LP) - Translucent Orange Vinyl

Drop the needle on Welcome Home and the room shifts. Hannah Cohen’s voice arrives like a curtained window opening on a bright but tender morning. It is a breakup record at heart, but not the kind that wallows. She trims away the noise and lets soft guitars, steady drums, and a few well-placed keys surround stories that feel closer than close. Released in 2019 on Bella Union, her third album is the most surefooted thing she’s made so far, the kind of quiet that keeps pulling you back.

Cohen has always favored restraint, though here it feels purposeful rather than shy. She cut these songs in upstate New York with producer Sam Evian, and you can hear the air of that space in every take. The band plays as if everyone is leaning in: brushed cymbals, lightly overdriven guitar, bass that nudges rather than pushes. Nothing rushes. That patience gives the record a lived-in warmth, the sense of a small room where each instrument has room to breathe.

Wasting My Time is the entry point for many, and it earns the role. The tempo lopes, the guitars shimmer, and Cohen sings like she’s studied both the ache and the acceptance that follows. It’s deceptively simple songwriting. She circles a feeling until it stops resisting, never raising her voice to make the point. This Is Your Life might be the album’s most striking moment, a mid-tempo hush built on an elegant progression and a rhythm section that never clutters. The lyric reads like a mirror held up to a friend and to herself at once. So much of Welcome Home finds power in that conversational tone, like you’ve stepped into a diary that forgives you for reading.

The production choices suit that intimacy. Evian has a knack for tape-warm textures and un-fussy arrangements, and Cohen meets him there with melodies that feel inevitable once you’ve heard them. The guitars rarely sparkle so much as glow. Keys might appear for a phrase and then retreat. Backing vocals shade the edges without stealing focus. You can hear the room on the snare, a little wood in the kick, and Cohen’s voice right up front, where it belongs. Spin the Welcome Home vinyl and the depth becomes clear, the low end soft and round, the top end silky but never brittle. It’s a record built for late-night plays and early-morning resets.

What lingers is how Cohen writes to the moment just after heartbreak, when the noise dies down and the details come into focus. She’s less concerned with plot than with the textures of memory and the way a tone of voice can level you. The melodies carry a hint of classic pop craft but refuse ornament for ornament’s sake. Fans of Aldous Harding’s stillness or the softer corners of Cat Power will find a familiar hush here, though Cohen’s phrasing is her own. She leans into the vowel, lets the consonant land late, and somehow makes the pause as meaningful as the line.

As an object, the record feels right. Bella Union’s sensibility translates well to wax, and Hannah Cohen vinyl tends to reward folks who care about how a quiet album can still fill a room. If you’re crate-digging at a Melbourne record store, keep an eye out. The jacket art looks elegant on a shelf, and it’s the kind of LP you loan to a friend and then immediately want back. If you prefer to buy Hannah Cohen records online, you’ll find Welcome Home vinyl floating around, tucked next to other Bella Union titles, a low-key trove for anyone exploring Hannah Cohen albums on vinyl. I’ve even seen it pop up among vinyl records Australia sellers when the import stock rotates through.

There’s no grand reinvention here, just a careful refining of what Cohen does best. The songs feel like they were written with a guitar on the lap and a cup cooling by the window, then recorded before anything precious crept in. It’s concise, humane, and unafraid of quiet. Welcome Home won’t shout for your attention. It earns it, song by song, breath by breath, and leaves you with the odd comfort of realizing the afterlife of a breakup can be a place you actually want to spend time.