It’s 26 degrees with a gale warning in Brooklyn the evening I’m planning to meet Grumpy frontperson Heaven Schmitt. We’re going to Singers, the Bed-Stuy queer bar that looks convincingly unassuming from the outside. Besides its comically brash social media presence, it’s known for hosting an annual trans Olympics, for sometimes serving complimentary guacamole to bisexual people, and for being the place where Addison Rae once arrived unannounced and danced with strangers to her own song. Its main room is outfitted with red lights, mod furniture, and numerous vintage TVs screening films that are just as old. In short: Schmitt fits in here perfectly.

Schmitt shows up wearing a jacket over another jacket with wide-leg pants that go together but don’t quite match and a knitted beret Nardwuar might like. On their face are two hearts stamped below their eyes and a smile that hardly wanes over the course of the next hour. They lace their sentences with zillennial slang like “simp” and “yap,” often leaning into conspicuous sarcasm, and they put on a faux Appalachian twang when they tell me they were raised in Charlotte, North Carolina. They exude a sort of contagious excitability — and right now, especially, Schmitt has a lot to be excited about.

Today, Grumpy are sharing “Lonesome Ride,” a slice of twinkly, upbeat indie-pop featuring Sidney Gish and fellow New York act Precious Human. It’s Grumpy’s first new music since last October’s Wolfed, which earned them spots on our lists of 2024’s standout EPs as well as one of the Best New Artists of the year. “Sidney was probably the biggest influence on the first Grumpy record,” Schmitt says, referring to their 2020 guitar-forward debut album Loser. “We just happened to become buddies in the music scene. She’s such a genius. We went to karaoke the other night, and she chose ‘Cha-Cha Slide.’ And I was like, ‘You are next level.’ Her perspective on everything just blows my mind.”

Schmitt was motivated to start making music around age 13 or 14 after hearing Death Cab For Cutie’s “Crooked Teeth” for the first time. Consciously or not, Schmitt would go on to mirror that song’s lucid yearning in their own songwriting: “I’m just a few spare parts with a credit card and some bad reviews,” they lament on Wolfed’s sparse, lovelorn ballad “Beach Towel.” In high school, they played in a handful of bands, and decided to study songwriting at Belmont University. “That was such a goof,” Schmitt recalls of that choice. “But I had such a strong community there. I have a long of friendships in music that are, like, 10 years strong now.”

Priceless creative partnerships aside, Schmitt graduated Belmont with a clouded sense of their artistic self. They were convinced that in order to make a living off of their music, they had to make music that was commercially viable — a trait that doesn’t necessarily present itself in Grumpy’s off-kilter indie pop. “My music was shit in college,” they say. “It was time to graduate, and I was like, ‘It’s too late for me. I guess I just don’t have what it takes.'” For a while, they remember, they couldn’t even look at their guitar without feeling a tinge of shame.

And so Schmitt nabbed a job at a marketing agency instead. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the corporate office lifestyle wasn’t for them, either, and they combatted that disinterest by playing music again — just for fun, just for themself. “This whole album of songs just fell out so easily,” they say. “They were so goofy and dorky. I was like, ‘Damn, these are kinda fire.'” Those songs became Loser, the first Grumpy album.

Loser arrived in March 2020. Over the course of the next four years, Schmitt went through what they call a “real identity thickening.” Firstly, they got married and came out: “I kind of knew I was gay, but I didn’t know quite how terminal the situation was,” they explain. “I had a lot of insecurity about myself, and gender was a part of it. Once I found out that non-binary was even an option, I spent a lot of time wishing I was non-binary. And my friend was like, ‘Dude, do what you need to do, but I don’t think cis people are thinking that.'”

Then, Schmitt got divorced and immediately moved to New York. The real kicker — and the lede to most of the press surrounding Wolfed — is that their ex-husband, Austin Arnold, is still Grumpy’s drummer, and he’s not Schmitt’s only ex in the band. “They’re my darlings,” Schmitt insists casually. “We always joke that breaking up with me is a life sentence of dedication to the band, but they’re all very good to me. They understand me so deeply, so thoroughly. I don’t really have to direct them.”

Being understood, it seems, is one of Schmitt’s top priorities, and something they feel they didn’t quite accomplish on Loser. “It was an epic first try, but I wasn’t in love with Loser,” they reminisce between sips of a zero-proof beer. (They cut out drinking when they moved to New York to save money but also because they like a little challenge.) Compounded with their breakup with Arnold, that “identity thickening” included a few band name changes and a whole separate album that Schmitt has since scrapped. “I wanted to distance myself from Grumpy,” they say. “Right before I was getting ready to self-release that album, I was like, ‘You know what? I miss being Grumpy. No one else is responsible for me not liking Loser.’ I just had a gut feeling.”

As Grumpy 2.0, Schmitt became shameless. Though love and crushes are a consistent theme through Wolfed, they envelop that desire in darkly-funny introspection. “You can’t play me like that/ I’m loose peanuts in your bag/ High as fuck at the RadioShack/ Begging for a charger,” they sing over a pseudo-trap beat on EP opener “Saltlick.” “It’s almost like a fucking humiliation kink,” Schmitt says. “I’m trying to expose my most shameful shit so that I can laugh at it. So much of what I’ve been putting out is just inviting everyone to laugh at what a damn simp I am.”

That shamelessness caught the attention of Bayonet, who released Wolfed and will issue its follow-up companion EP later this year. Grumpy’s bassist Anya Good directed photography surrounding the project, which often implements Joker-sized smiles, distorted body parts, and witch-like ensembles: “Anya’s just a little freakazoid alien, and when I look at the art we make, I’m like, ‘Yeah, this is how this shit feels to me.’ It’s twee and fun and goofy, but has such a darkness to it. I don’t know if I’m just that attracted to talent or if I just got lucky with my collaborators, but they know how to show up for the vision I’m asking for.”

Though Grumpy is first and foremost Schmitt’s project, collaboration, especially with friends, is a habit of theirs. It was through one of their creatively collaborative friendships that they wound up singing on a recent Zach Bryan single.

“My friend Jack Van Cleaf, who I went to college with, I’ve sang on his records for years and years,” Schmitt explains of the unlikely pairing. “Zach was apparently listening to Jack’s music and said, ‘I want whoever did harmonies on your album.’ And it was me. I walked into this studio full of dudes, and I was just like, ‘Fuck it. Zach Bryan’s a star, and he’s not shy, so I’m not gonna be shy.’ And I left feeling like I was way too much, giving my opinion on how the song should sound. But then Zach kept calling me asking to do harmonies on demos. One day, he called me saying, ‘I want to put a song out tonight. Can you do harmonies in 30 minutes?’ In 31 minutes, I banged out harmonies on ‘This World’s A Giant.’ Fuckin’ slayed.”

@grumpyismyleastfavband Crazy. I sang vocals on this song at about 1pm yesterday and now its out. Thanks Zach for taking a chance on me. #zachbryan #transrights #transmusician This World's A Giant – Zach Bryan

Even Wolfed’s title plays into Schmitt’s pursuit of almost villainous, tongue-in-cheek chutzpah: “It’s hard for me to call Grumpy a character, because it really is just me at my hammiest. But I really relate to the whole ‘big bad wolf’ thing — this overconfident dude whose bravado is ultimately his demise. I get such a kick out of the shock value of it all, which is probably why I talk so much about getting divorced from my drummer.”

On its own, writing an album about divorce is nothing revolutionary; what does feel revolutionary, however, is Schmitt’s attitude towards their own experience of it. “I think my greater purpose in life is to be a devoted friend, and to love and be loved in my community,” they say. “So much of my security was in Austin, and the disillusion of that relationship was, to me, worst-case scenario. It was my biggest fears coming true. And I ended up happier than ever, and each year has been better and better since. So now, I’m just like, ‘What do I have to be afraid of?'”