New Biography Explores the Life and Music of Her’s

WORDS BY SOLEIL RUMPIT

Put on a Her’s song, and the room goes soft at the edges. Both of the late-2010s indie band’s albums are misty and dreamlike; their sound casts a spell that would typically break when you learn more about how it's made, but in this case, the opposite is true. The more you know about Stephen Fitzpatrick and Audun Laading, the Liverpool-made duo behind Her’s, the better you understand why their legacy endures.

There are twenty chapters for all twenty songs of the band’s discography in Patrick Breen’s new autobiography, “The Story of Her’s.” Released on Oct. 20 of this year, Breen resists mythologizing the band, who died in a car accident while on tour in 2019, and instead offers a portrait of two young artists and the treasured music they created.

“I gained a massive appreciation of how intricate their music is as I started to write it,” Breen tells EMMIE. “That’s the backbone of why [...] their popularity isn’t just because they passed so tragically, it’s because the songs are crafted well. And it wasn’t any kind of fluke. These are people who knew what they were doing.”

Through intimate interviews with the band’s producer, collaborators, family, fans and childhood friends, Breen paints an image of two particular people who, at a very particular moment, had a lot to give to the world both creatively and personally. 

Take “Marcel,” for example, one of the band’s most recognizable songs. An anecdote from the book recounts Fitzpatrick and Laading finding an old wallet in a thrift store with a photo and ID for a man named Marcel. They tried to track him down and return it, but soon realized that the owner had passed, and wrote him a song instead. This act of kindness toward a stranger illustrates how the music of Her’s was written by people who cared about people they’d never met and the things they might save from being lost to time.

Her’s was signed to Heist or Hit records, a label currently sporting a roster featuring UK-based indie rock artists like Nature TV and Westside Cowboy. Under Heist or Hit, Her's released their only two albums, which Breen explores through the memories of people who worked with them, befriended them and came to love them.

“I had thought for a long time that someone, maybe not me, but someone, should make something out of this,” Breen says, “I started going sporadically through their music and their lives — it was like putting puzzle pieces together.”

“The Story of Her’s” evolved from just one interview with the band’s agent for a college project to speaking with the earliest of their fans to visiting their old stomping grounds in Liverpool. Two themes persist throughout the book: kindness and timelessness. Its nonlinear structure, though scattered at points, echoes the ability of Her’s to color time with emotion and get a little lost in memory.

“There’s not a lot of bands that you say are cool because they’re nice,” Breen says. “Usually, they’re cool because they’re like Oasis, yelling at each other and breaking things and trashing hotel rooms. Her’s was the opposite of that.”

This quality shows up throughout their discography and carries into the stories told by their friends and collaborators. For two people who were so skilled — both graduates of Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts — Fitzpatrick and Laading retained humility and humor that Breen hopes readers remember alongside their music.

Patrick Breen saw what made a band this small and brief feel permanent. They had the ears (and hearts) to recognize sound that could hold you in a certain moment in time, and the rare skill to create it. The people Breen interviews in “The Story of Her’s” testify to this over and over again. With his gift for drawing them out in conversation and writing these textured, intimate stories, fans old and new are able to see it, too.

As Breen puts it in his book: “For fans of Her’s, we can only ask the question of what once was and what could have been, yet still there is an element of dreamlike optimism in all of Her’s lyrics, no matter how forlorn the narrator finds themself.”

The spell holds, and the two people who cast it feel closer than ever.