At the very outset of Heaven, the 7th studio album by The Walkmen, the first thing you hear is surprising and significant: Hamilton Leithauser seems to be singing, for the first time, in his actual range. The man who's hoarse, desperate vocal propels the band's best known song, "The Rat," almost to the brink of overload suddenly evinces a kind of character and depth never before heard from The Walkmen.

That lead-off track, "We Can't Be Beat," is remarkable for its comparative restraint and emotional subtlety for this band, and that multi-hued warmth and newly found atmospheric complexity continues throughout the record (which is notable, given that that's basically what I said about their last album, Lisbon, too. You can't say this band isn't continuing to evolve).

There are a couple of things our man Hamilton seems to have left behind, in fact: not just his propensity to belt out at the outer limits of what's reachable or healthy for his vocal chords, but also that risey-falley Dylan thing he's been doing for years too. Instead, he's actually singing the melody — a fact that seems to be echoed in a line from "Heartbreaker," when he admits, "It's not just the singer, it's the song." It's as if Leithauser has realized there's much more to crafting a good song than embodying the Hamilton Leithauser character he's lived inside all these years and merely layering that character on top of the sound his band makes. However, he's done one better: he's found a way to still be himself without a lot of his former affectations. And The Walkmen's music is even better for it.

Heaven is an even mellower record than Lisbon, another step away from that career-defining howl of "The Rat." "Southern Heart," a whispery ballad, segues into "Line By Line," a warm, meditative single-chord rumination that wouldn't be out of place on a Fleet Foxes record. From there, "Song For Leigh" finds the band getting close to alt-country territory. Things pick up again on "The Love You Love" and the title track, but we're straight back to the mellow again with the classic-country of "No One Ever Sleeps."

The Walkmen won me over with Lisbon after a string of albums that had me on the fence for quite some time. Heaven is going to be the record that finally places them in my personal rotation.