The rupture and reward of Shura's reinvention

In the book, a stranded pilot stumbles upon an otherworldly prince who has travelled to Earth to cure his loneliness. There, the prince encounters change and selfishness, but also love, understanding, and wonder. It’s a head-spinning tale – surely not just a light read for kids. It also ended up being exactly what Shura needed at the time, so much so that it became the North Star for her new record, I Got Too Sad for My Friends.

“I sat down and read it in one night. It’s not very long. I was not expecting to get [what I did] from it,” Shura confesses. “I was expecting to look at some pictures and be like, 'Oh, it’s cute.' But then it was just this really beautiful story that asks a lot of questions that I think are super relevant today.”

In university, Shura studied English literature, an experience she says unlocked her ability to not just understand stories but to use them to unpack and contextualise the world around her. On the cover of the new record, she sits alone atop a jagged stone in the Welsh countryside, with stately green mountains behind her. She’s wearing a half-suit of armour, combining a silver chestplate with a long-sleeved tee, ripped jeans, a Walkman, and Converse. She’s her own little prince, the 21st-century, Kurt Cobain-ified version she had to become during the album’s making. Leaning as ever towards intertextuality, she reached inside an old story to tell her own.

“It’s almost like, maybe, baby me coming to save grown up me,” she tells me, wiping away a stubborn tear. “It’s like my inner five-year-old being like, 'Come on, we’re going!'”

The years leading up to I Got Too Sad for My Friends were some of the most turbulent of Shura’s life. She’d moved to New York to pursue a relationship with her now-partner, she’d released an album (forevher) about the joys of all-encompassing romance, and then everything stopped. The pandemic halted the record’s campaign and left her stranded an ocean away from her family. Shortly after she was dropped from her label, leaving her without the financial backing to keep making her art in the way she always had. Then, on top of all that, a series of health scares began to pile up, eventually becoming serious enough to prompt her move back to the UK.

Getting dropped and being stuck in America was an isolation like Shura had never known before. “I had no source of income – virtually none – and that was a real challenge," she says. "I didn’t know if I was gonna make rent the next month."

"I also didn’t have a way of recording out there, so I had to try and acquire bits and pieces,” she explains. Her laptop broke mere weeks into the ordeal, and she had to go on a mad dash for friends of friends who could get her discounts and fixes to replace it. She started streaming as a gamer, at first as a way to find something to do and then to find a way to make some money, eventually creating her own gaming community.

Along the way, she was also figuring out how to record her own home demos, intent on building up enough of an archive so that she could send new material to label reps to try and find a new team. No demos meant no interest, and no interest meant no new backing to get her back on her feet to make another record. People don’t understand what it’s like to start again until they really have to start again, she tells me. At that time, she really, really had to start again. “There were many times when I would cry and be like, 'I don’t know if I’m ever going to do this again. I don’t know if I can. I don’t know if I genuinely want to,'” she says.

There were at least two or three years between Shura writing the first song that ended up on the record ("Richardson") and finally handing it in to her new label [PIAS], and a significant portion of that time was spent realising she was making an album after all. To soothe her way through the pain, she found herself listening to earthy-sounding, classic records and a lot of soft rock from the '60s. Paul Simon was regularly on, as was Cassandra Jenkins (who joins her on "Richardson"). It was like being wrapped up in a sonic cocoon, she says. So, when it came time to write, much of what came out followed in this tradition.

Her first demos were so simple, she says. She needed songs that were easy and effortless, writing to write rather than to amaze or defy or hide behind electronic smokescreens. Shura came up, of course, in a sound akin to icons like Christine and the Queens or Robyn – artists trading in the kind of bright, complex, delicate emo pop emblematic of the mid-2010s. A more modern peg for her early work might be the MUNA universe, but I Got Too Sad for My Friends is a true departure, leaning into the corners of pop more often inhabited by the lilting melancholia of The Japanese House and Bon Iver.

“I didn’t want to get to the end of three albums and realise I did everything the same way,” she says of her new creative direction. Having worked with producer Joel Pott on her two previous albums, Shura made the painful decision to bring in someone new for I Got Too Sad for My Friends – a switch-up she found both daunting and thrilling. There was no bad blood, she explains, just a desire to push herself farther and see what new inner wells she could tap. Teaming with Luke Smith (Foxes, Keaton Henson), she brought in sounds she hadn’t before, trying out clarinets, organic percussion, and the humble triangle, while still grounding the sound in her old loves like Juno synths.

“A lot of when I make records feels like a conscious decision,” Shura says. “But this album took a bit longer to make because it came out of a period of not being able to really write at all and a period of difficult emotions and feelings.” Everything about the album was a process of discovery. The title, for example, only came to her after throwing a stream-of-consciousness headline on a playlist of her demos on SoundCloud to send around. Yet, as soon as she saw those words on a page – “I got too sad for my friends” – she knew there was no other name for what she was doing. It was the same with most of her other realisations about the album: she made what she felt compelled to in the moment, only to find layers of meaning and need wrapped up in them later.

Whereas forevher and Shura's debut Nothing's Real were about finding and experiencing love, I Got Too Sad for My Friends is far more grounded in place and introspection. On “America”, for example, she ruminates about leaving her partner having realised that the country she’s in is no longer for her: “Out here in America / And I’m so sad that I am / But you’re here in America / And I should leave but I can’t.” Again, like the little prince, Shura might as well be on another planet, far from home and far from time-tested comforts and stuck in a country in flux. Yet, despite the challenges, she’s also fallen in love with this new place, for all its craziness and wonder. That push-pull between staying and going that grounds this track ultimately ballooned to become, as she tells me, the heartbeat of the record.

While writing the songs, Shura would dip in and out of trying those infamous “morning pages” from the book The Artist’s Way. Songs like “Leonard Street” – a reference to the street in Brooklyn near McCarren Park – are the method's clear product, ruminating on change through little vignettes of life in New York, the city where both everything and nothing stays the same. “Even if it’s an errant thought, I just write stuff down,” Shura says of her practice. “Even if at the time you don’t think about it, five years later you might not even know what that’s about, but you love the sentence and make it mean something else. You’re like a plant watering itself if you write."

These days, Shura’s back in London. Eventually the costs of dealing with her health while also paying NYC rent as a musician on hiatus became too much. She and her partner got rid of anything they didn’t have a sentimental attachment to – freight containers are eye-wateringly expensive – and left New York for good. When I ask what, if anything, she misses, she says it’s mainly the bodegas and bodega cats. And the tuna sandwich she became accustomed to at her favourite one in Brooklyn. “New York is also just the best city for walking and thinking and contemplating the meaning of life,” she says.

You can hear plenty of that in I Got Too Sad for My Friends, and the fact that it got completed at all is something of a personal triumph. “I can’t lie, I was incredibly nervous posting the first thing announcing a single and announcing the record – I was doing it for the first time in five years. My heart was racing before pressing enter,” she admits, marvelling that the album exists against all odds. “I’m so relieved that I did finish it. I’m really, really proud of it.”