we discuss a new method for obtaining a local limit theorem (llt) from a known distributional limit theorem. the method rests on a simple analytic inequality (essentially due to hardy, landau, and littlewood) which can be applied directly after quantifying the smoothness of the distribution of interest. these smoothness terms are non-trivial to handle and so we also provide new (probabilistic) tools for this purpose. we illustrate our approach by showing llts with rates for the magnetization in the curie-weiss model at high temperature and for some counts in an erdos-renyi random graph. this is joint work with adrian roellin.