Abstract In this paper we introduce new function spaces which we call anisotropic hyperbolic Besov and Triebel-Lizorkin spaces. Their definition is based on a hyperbolic Littlewood-Paley analysis involving an anisotropy vector only occurring in the smoothness weights. Such spaces provide a general and natural setting in order to understand what kind of anisotropic smoothness can be described using hyperbolic wavelets (in the literature also sometimes called tensor-product wavelets), a wavelet class which hitherto has been mainly used to characterize spaces of dominating mixed smoothness. A centerpiece of our present work are characterizations of these new spaces based on the hyperbolic wavelet transform. Hereby we treat both, the standard approach using wavelet systems equipped with sufficient smoothness, decay, and vanishing moments, but also the very simple and basic hyperbolic Haar system. The second major question we pursue is the relationship between the novel hyperbolic spaces and the classical anisotropic Besov–Lizorkin-Triebel scales. As our results show, in general, both approaches to resolve an anisotropy do not coincide. However, in the Sobolev range this is the case, providing a link to apply the newly obtained hyperbolic wavelet characterizations to the classical setting. In particular, this allows for detecting classical anisotropies via the coefficients of a universal hyperbolic wavelet basis, without the need of adaption of the basis or a-priori knowledge on the anisotropy.