On 12 May 2017, a small Liverpool label called Heist or Hit Records released Songs of Her’s, a nine-track compilation by two recent graduates from the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts who still seemed a tad surprised that strangers had started turning up to their gigs. Stephen Fitzpatrick, who grew up in Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria, had met Norwegian bassist Audun Laading while both were playing in another local band called The Sundogs. They formed Her’s in 2015 while filming deliberately awkward comedy videos around Liverpool, then carried that same slightly off-centre sensibility into a melange of heartbreak, loneliness and memory channelled through their music. Songs of Her’s preserved that early period almost accidentally because the compilation gathered together singles the duo had already released across 2016 and 2017 while they were still learning what kind of band they wanted to become.

What always stayed with me about Her’s was how carefully their music revealed the things Stephen and Audun loved, because every song felt assembled from references that mattered deeply to them in private, long before anyone started attaching meaning to them in public. Stephen often spoke about admiring Ariel Pink’s hazy production techniques and Bruce Springsteen’s directness, while both musicians carried an obvious affection for Twin Peaks during the period surrounding Invitation to Her’s in 2018.

That reverence seemed to extend into their songwriting because Her’s consistently built tunes around lonely characters, forgotten objects and strange fragments of everyday life. “Harvey” took its title from the 1950 James Stewart film about a man whose closest companion is an invisible rabbit, though soon Audun started introducing it live as a song about the love you carry for your best friend. “Marcel” came from a wallet the pair found inside a vintage jacket bought in Liverpool, after they tracked down the identity card inside and discovered the original owner had already died. Even their stage presence felt strangely self-contained — Audun sometimes performed in a cape bought from the women’s section of TK Maxx because he genuinely found the whole thing funny, while the pair toured with a cardboard cut-out of Pierce Brosnan that Stephen once called the band’s “spirit animal.”

Over time, those small details accumulated into something unusually tender, and their seminal breakout single, “What Once Was”, was at the core of that mythology. Stephen wrote the song around the death of his mother, who died when he was 11, burying that grief inside lyrics that flittered cautiously around absence. The song opens with an instantly recognisable cascading guitar riff that barely changes across the runtime. Stephen sings the chorus low and deep, staying almost conversational throughout, while Auden’s bass line moves underneath playfully. Fans responded intensely almost immediately. During interviews around Invitation to Her’s, Stephen admitted that crowds regularly shouted requests for “What Once Was” before the band had even got on stage because the track had already become inseparable from the group’s identity.

I first found the band late one night last year while doomscrolling on Instagram when my algorithm surfaced a clip of two young musicians preparing to perform inside a cramped studio where shelves packed with books, vinyl records and old film canisters stretched almost to the ceiling. One of them stood with a bass guitar strapped high against his chest, wearing an oversized off-white jacket and a tiny black beanie pulled tightly over his head. Beside him, the guitarist wore dark dungarees, scuffed trainers and an identical beanie while bouncing in giddy anticipation on his knees before the song started. The room looked warm in a deeply unglamorous way, but what felt warmer was the knowing glance the two shared before they began. What struck me watching them for the first time was how painfully young they both looked. One seemed permanently caught between shyness and amusement, while the other looked genuinely delighted by the simple fact that he got to play music beside a friend.

My first instinct after hearing the song was embarrassingly predictable, because seconds into the soft, suspended sadness of that gorgeous opening riff, I immediately opened the comments section looking for the band’s name. I cannot begin to describe the wave of incapacitating melancholia that washed over me after reading “gone too soon”.

Stephen, Auden and their tour manager Trevor Engelbrektson were killed on 27 March 2019 while driving from Phoenix, Arizona, to Santa Ana, California, during the band’s second North American tour. Arizona authorities later confirmed that another driver had entered the highway in the wrong direction before colliding head-on with the group’s van near Tonopah. Stephen was 24, and Auden was 25.

Beneath a YouTube upload of that same performance of “What Once Was” at Paste Studios in New York City, millions of listeners now gather in the comments with the knowledge that both men would have died before turning 26. Across those few minutes of footage, the pair seemed so entirely alive and completely absorbed in each other’s timing and presence, that the terrible awareness of what would happen to them is now an inextricable part of the band’s elegiac legacy. The comments now drift constantly between admiration and mourning, and the performance has gradually taken on the shape of a living memorial that listeners continue returning to years after it was first uploaded.

There was something strangely unguarded about the music the two made together on Songs of Her’s, which probably explains why the band travelled so easily across different corners of the internet long after their deaths. Stephen and Audun filled their shoegazy bedroom pop with odd little details and offbeat humour that gave them a gentleness and universality because listeners could approach the songs from a whole spectrum of emotional places and still find themselves reflected somewhere inside them. Even their oddest ideas felt curiously sincere because they approached their eccentricity with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of amusing each other first and the audience second. I still think “What Once Was” explains that connection better than anything else they recorded. Stephen’s lyrics may have been moulded by death but the song hardly ever confronts that pain directly which somehow makes it feel even sadder in retrospect. 

Most of the new music I fall in love with reaches me through pure digital happenstance, usually because my algorithm decides I need to hear it at one in the morning or because somebody has attached it to a moody Instagram reel; Her’s was given a second life in exactly the same fashion. Every new listener who discovers “What Once Was” today seems to follow the same miserable little pipeline of enchantment to curiosity to devastation. There is also the perverse thrill of introducing the track to somebody for the first time because you get to watch them sit there completely smitten, knowing that in about five minutes, they are going to run headfirst into one of the most crushing pieces of indie music lore imaginable.

Whenever I revisit their music, I often find myself crippled by the sadness of knowing Stephen and Auden never witnessed any of that themselves. Still, there’s something extraordinary about the way their music continues travelling through people’s lives with nearly a decade’s worth of memories they never had the chance to witness firsthand.