PHOTOGRAPHY Sophie Williams & Charlotte Croft
When I ask Shura how she plans on celebrating the release of her hotly-anticipated third album, she shrugs, and replies, “I’ll probably do a Twitch stream.” The self-appointed “nerd” takes solace in gaming, and watching others game, although it wasn’t always this way. “I never thought I’d enjoy watching someone else play a game as a gamer. When I was a kid, you never wanted to watch your friend play, you’d be screaming at them to pass the controller. But once you’ve played a game, it’s so much fun to watch someone else experience the chaos.”
Her game of choice? She loves playing The Last of Us, or if she’s seeking the comfort of a cosy stream, she’ll watch strangers play The Sims. “The first time I experienced The Last of Us was with my twin brother playing because it was too scary for me. But I loved watching him play, and I remember thinking, ‘This would make a great TV show’.”
Her other comforts include cuddling up with her two cats, Winifred and Flump – “one has a normal, old lady name, and then the other is completely ridiculous” – and spending time with family. Not that she needs it – having quietly stepped back from public life and social media posting amid the pandemic quarantine in 2020, Shura has reemerged with her most revealing and vulnerable record yet.
I Got Too Sad For My Friends recounts a troubling time in the London native artist’s life, as she was forced to cut her tour short and isolate alone in New York during the COVID-19 pandemic, spiralling her into depression. However, despite its sombre subject matter, the album is touching, hopeful, occasionally humorous and painfully relatable, offering heartfelt lyrics to the indescribable loneliness and disconnection that come from mental health struggles. Recording live for the first time, the record features earthy textures, chamber music arrangements and gospel-like harmonies, breathing new – and very human – life into her signature psych-pop sound.
Having already released singles ‘Recognise’, ‘Richardson’ featuring Cassandra Jenkins, who Shura says played an integral role in inspiring her record, and ‘World’s Worst Girlfriend’, today she commemorates the album release with a focus on the track, ‘I Wanna Be Loved By You’, a tender piano ballad that features the voices of her closest friends, family and creative collaborators in a choir echoing the earnest sentiment throughout the chorus, while Shura delicately reflects on a tumultuous love: “I know you’re not trying to hurt me / Don’t know why I’m mad at you, but I’m mad / Wish I could forgive you, but I can’t / Try to put the phone down on me, then you told me Jesus loves me, But I guess the only thing that’s true / I wanna be loved by you.”
Below, Shura shares how international travel, fantasy games and starting a new era has inspired her latest album, I Got Too Sad For My Friends.
London, Tokyo & New York
Place names play a key role across the record, offering titles for tracks ‘Tokyo’, ‘Leonard Street’, ‘America’ and ‘Richardson’, after Richardson Street, where Shura would take long meditative walks. The former, the album’s opening track, took inspiration from the last city Shura toured in 2019, and became her starting point for the new album.
She wrote the majority of the album in London, following an extended stay in New York during 2020 and 2021 – “time is a weird soup,” she smirks, thinking back on hazy memories of the COVID-19 pandemic. The exceptions to this were second single ‘Richardson’, which she wrote while still isolating in her Brooklyn apartment, and ‘America’, which was penned during Donald Trump’s first term in office. “I was hopeful that this would be a thing that only happened once, so [on the song] I imagined a world where this song would be released at a different time, in a different world. Obviously, the universe had other plans, so I think the song lands a little bit differently now,” she explains. “Maybe it would have landed differently if we didn’t have a second Trump term and the world wasn’t as cursed as it is.” She asserts that the song and its soon-to-be-released accompanying music video is “one of the most beautiful things” she’s ever made.
“America became a huge character on the record,” she recounts. “It was a strange place to fall in love. I love it there, but I knew there was so much happening that didn’t feel good, so it was a complicated love affair, and I think this fed into the textures and folk-inspired sounds across the album.” She listened to Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon and James Taylor, and worked with engineer Marta Saloni and producer Daniel James Goodwin to connect her with native musicians to collaborate with. The inspiration is clear across the relaxed rhythms of ‘Leonard Street’ and in the punchy percussion on ‘Ringpull’.
I love [America], but I knew there was so much happening that didn’t feel good, so it was a complicated love affair, and I think this fed into the textures and folk-inspired sounds across the album.
Baldur’s Gate, The Little Prince & unprotective armour
The album’s title, I Got Too Sad For My Friends, is a vulnerable reflection of the artist’s mental state while isolating. “This title feels like the most me thing I could say about getting a bit depressed, but it still has a sense of humour,” she reveals. “When you’re in that headspace, you feel like it’s all you talk about, and how boring and burdensome that must be to everyone else. So you think, rather than burden them with myself, I will just lock myself away, which is the most ridiculous and unhelpful solution to the problem of being sad and needing support. It’s the opposite of what you should do.”
During this time, Shura reverted to playing the Dungeons & Dragons-inspired video game, Baldur’s Gate. “It’s ridiculous. It’s the funniest game I’ve ever played, and the sex scenes? I feel like I need to leave the room!” she giggles. While she’s typically been more of a sci-fi than a fantasy gamer, the game caught her eye after receiving rave reviews for its storyline and its music, and became a source of comfort while she finished the album. One character in particular, a “sexy elf” named Shadowheart, wore a distinctive armoured breastplate which ended up on her moodboard for the album’s artwork.
“As a millesbial,” – that’s a millennial lesbian – “I remember watching Leonardo DiCaprio’s iconic fish tank scene in Romeo + Juliet and not knowing whether I fancied him or I wanted to be him. As I got older, it became obvious it was the latter.” In the scene, DiCaprio dons a knight’s costume, complete with armoured arms and a chainmail vest. “These references were coalescing for me, and I was talking with a friend about the metaphor of wearing armour but covering nothing useful – similar to the way that when you isolate, you’re trying to solve a problem with something that will not help, and will likely make it worse – and she suggested I should read The Little Prince.” Shura says she was struck by the image of the prince on the top of a mountain, alone. “I really wanted to capture the image of me being alone in a destitute landscape.”
I remember watching Leonardo DiCaprio’s iconic fish tank scene in Romeo + Juliet and not knowing whether I fancied him or I wanted to be him. As I got older, it became obvious it was the latter.
Immersing in nature & queer friendships
To capture the otherworldly terrain she envisioned for the album artwork, Shura and her team of queer creative collaborators headed to Wales. She admits they didn’t do a recce, and ascended the mountains in June last year, hoping for the best, only to be met with biting winds. They paused their expedition to perch on a rock, which became the backdrop for the shoot. “It was quite brutal actually, to be up there with a team carrying all this gear. Brutal, yet beautiful,” she shares, before adding: “I understand now why a lot of people don’t shoot outside!”
Despite a running nose, and with the help of a foil blanket, she persisted until they’d captured the shot. “Nature was a big character on the album, so it was important to me that the outside world was prominent in the visualisers,” she explains. “A really important part of the process for me is to create a world [around the album] that you’re inviting people into. For this album, this meant green nature, rocks, and just a patchwork of colours and tones that reflect the textures on the record, which feel natural and tactile.”
She worked with photographer Sophie Williams on the album artwork, while Charlotte Croft supported on additional visualisers. “This album feels like it’s been made by the queerest group of creative people I’ve worked with so far, and it makes such a difference when you have that mutual understanding and experience. I’ve become friends with a lot of people I worked with across the album, and that is so precious to me.”
She admits that in adulthood, she has found it difficult to make friends. “Unless you’re part of a football team, or a group that meets regularly, how are you supposed to make friends?” she says. She admits that she has “hermit-like” tendencies and is rarely caught on a night out, so meeting new creatives through the album has been particularly joyful.
English literature, Olivia Laing & Bed Chem
Upon arrival at the BRICKS studio, Shura asserts that she’s “obsessed” with pop princess Sabrina Carpenter. “She’s getting me through this final stretch of the album,” she reveals. “‘Bed Chem’ has me in a chokehold right now. I was in the gym yesterday and I listened to it on loop for an hour while doing pull-ups. She’s really getting me through my muscle mommy journey. Honestly, thank fuck for Sabrina!” Aside from gym motivation, she says she has been inspired by Carpenter’s tongue-in-cheek lyricism.
As an English Literature student at university, Shura admits that she would like to read more books than she presently makes time for. “When you have to read Dickens and write multiple thousand-word essays on it, it can kill your love. I felt allergic to reading, because I had to do so much of it,” she jokes. This all changed when she read The Lonely City by Olivia Laing, which follows a British woman moving to New York City and grappling with loneliness, both personally and through the lens of art. “I’m quite picky about what I read, and about when I read it. I read the most in January – thinking I ought to read more – and then I’ll usually write a song about what has inspired me.”
Writing lyrics, she explains, is when she’s at her pickiest. “I pour over them, right up until I’m recording vocals. Even in the booth, I’ll be changing singular words, or reading a sentence over and over.” Listening to pop music, like Sabrina’s, is encouraging her to let go of perfectionism. “Good pop is great, and listening to pop songs can be really helpful as they’re so melody-driven.” She pauses. “It would be fun to care less, sometimes. I have to remind myself that no one cares as much as you do about the thing you’re editing. That’s not to say you shouldn’t care – I think caring is the coolest thing anyone can do – but you can get stuck in the weeds, and it feels good to let things go.”
It would be fun to care less, sometimes. That’s not to say you shouldn’t care – I think caring is the coolest thing anyone can do – but you can get stuck in the weeds, and it feels good to let things go.
Ignoring her inner critic & trying new things
Amid her depression, Shura was restrained by self-doubt. “I’ve named my inner critic Cuntina,” she smiles. “Tina for short, but Cuntina is her government name.” Separating her critic from herself, she is able to step back in moments clouded by negative judgement. “I remind myself that no one has to see or hear everything you do, but if you don’t put it out into the universe, you can’t make an assessment. If you don’t let it exist, then you’ll never know.”
Pushing past her insecurities, she set out to make I Got Too Sad For My Friends unlike any of her previous work. For 2016’s Nothing’s Real and 2019’s forevher, she worked closely with Joel Pott. “I could make records with him for the rest of my life, but I had a moment during the pandemic where I thought, ‘I don’t know if I’m ever going to get to do this again’,” she explains. “I think it was a powerful lesson to learn at that stage in my career, because it’s easy to forget how fortunate I am to get to do this as a job. It’s not an easy job, it’s not easy on your brain, and you can become complacent, so having an experience that reminded me that I could not be doing [music] because of reasons outside of my control – especially if you don’t come from generational wealth and your Dad can pay for your next album – I felt like it was a blessing to be able to do this again.”
This mindset powered Shura to do everything she’s wanted to do and hasn’t done yet while producing a record – for this album, it meant recording live with all the musicians in together, and working with new instruments like clarinets, extended percussion stations and a Hammond organ. Playing with new textures, she experimented with stacked harmonies and layered live instrumentation. “Coming out of this period, I thought, ‘how do I approach this record about a difficult time in my life, a really sad time, with maximum joy?’” she reflects. “I get the most joy out of this process, making the album, so that was my approach. In the past, I’ve worried about things that I didn’t need to worry about. I’m an anxious person, but I’ve been trying to approach this album with a real sense of fun.”
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