Her Only Presence were a band from Barcelona (originally Mallorca), Spain, active from 2005 until 2012. The band began as a solo acoustic project for frontman Luis Cifre, who started out playing acoustic emo with some folk influences. After playing with several different lineups in live performances, Cifre would transition the project to a full band following 2009's A Brand New Start. While the majority of Her Only Presence's discography is therefore comprised of acoustic emo pop, the band's last two releases are midwest emo with a vein of post-rock (their 2011 LP was produced by The Appleseed Cast's Chris Crisci, a very apparent influence).
The timing of Her Only Presence's last album makes it tempting to label them an emo revival act, but I think they don't quite fit. Cifre's solo efforts predate the movement by a considerable margin, placing him in the company of other prescient acts like Up Up Down Down or oh my god elephant. The music itself also eschews the Kinsella influence usually seen in emo revival bands, though this is in and of itself not reason to disassociate from the movement as others did the same. In combination, however, I think that Her Only Presence qualifies as a forward-thinking outlier.
The project started with a 2005 demo CDr and two tracks submitted to a Dreamville Records Sampler, only one of which would end up on the first album, Ghost Of The Year, also released in 2005. Two years later, Cifre put out The Hurt Process, another full LP. In 2009 he released A Brand New Start, which featured a fuller sound than previous efforts with more varied instrumentation, a sign of where the project was headed. Then, 2011 saw the project become a band with the release of You're Never Back, the most well-known work of Her Only Presence, put out by legendary UK emo label Engineer Records; the same year, they also contributed a track to an Engineer compilation. The band's last release was in 2012, a split with L'hereu Escampa.
