After six years in a self-confessed ‘musical wilderness’, singer/songwriter/producer Shura is preparing for the release of her third album, I Got Too Sad For My Friends, out 30th May. The swooping first single was ‘Realise‘, with its epic 80s drums and the message of self-comfort ‘with a coffee and a good book’. Next single, ‘Richardson‘, out today is a duet with Cassandra Jenkins, one of a carefully-selected handful of artists to appear on the album whose music helped bring Shura back to the fold. The track is a 70s autumnal ode to walking, thinking and the search for clarity.

On the album Shura jokes about being the ‘World’s Worst Girlfriend’, delivers an ever-welcome wail over closer ‘Bad Kid’ and hooks up with Helado Negro for the only love song on the album and our current favourite, ‘If You Don’t Believe In Love.’

To celebrate the release of the second single, we sat down with Shura to discuss her writing process, potential titles for album No.4 and brushing her teeth to Mariah Carey….

So, Shura, how the devil are you?
I’m good! I’m cold. I’m not really moving much at the moment because I’ve hurt my knee. I’ve just started Jiu Jitsu. I thought, ‘Oh that’s a great idea’ and now I have something called Hoffa’s Fat Pad Impingement which sounds like a great name for my fourth album.

I currently have longer hair and want to cut it short but am fearful of the jowls that will give me! Time for me to return to the gym too. Maybe not Jiu Jitsu then…
I have gone through a variety of hair styles, not all of them wonderful, like my recent reverse mullet or a double Karen. A very odd experience. But life’s too short, if you don’t like it, grow it again!

OK, sold. I’m cutting it. You are returning to us now, after six years away. Why have you decided the time is right?
I would like to say that in general I am a snail. I made a website for my first album called ‘Is Shura’s album finished yet?’ because that took me three years to make. But also there was so much that happened, like obviously there was the pandemic. I was halfway through touring Forevher with huge plans to tour Asia and again in the States. That all just kind of disappeared overnight as it did for everyone.
I couldn’t listen to music for the first six months to a year either. I found it very painful, partly because we were all supposed to be out there playing it. I was just playing video games. I didn’t feel inspired. I think it was Maggie Rogers who said, ‘You really need to water your brain with experience to be able to write’ and I was dehydrated!
And then my label dropped me! I’m not in a position where I can afford to make a record independently. I was half-hoping that Twitch streaming would become so lucrative that I would be able to! So yeah, there were really just lots of little bumps in the road.

I was just reading an interview with Tamara from The Weather Station and she was saying that she creates the music first and then plays with words to fit in afterwards which seemed a different approach to me. What comes first for you when writing?
The way I write has evolved a lot. When I started writing, at fourteen or fifteen, a melody was really unimportant. My Dad actually asked me, ‘Are you ever going to write a chorus?!’ I am not classically trained, I can’t read music. I do everything by ear. So melody and chord progression came with time.
I also think that as I’ve become older I’ve found my internal critic. Sometimes this meant I was writing better lyrics and sometimes I would kill an idea before I got it down on the page.
What I have done since the first record is try to write down every little detail or idea. Then I might be playing guitar and be like, ‘Oh I am not really sure,’ flip through my book, find a sentence and think, ‘Oh that’s interesting.’ Then I’ll try and find a melody that works with that.

I was watching a clip with Finneas this morning and he was talking about how popular specificity had become and how he actually found it harder to connect with a song with too many specific details. Something that I disagree with but an interesting viewpoint. I wondered what you thought?
First I would say that some people don‘t care about lyrics full stop and that’s fascinating to me. I could listen to a song that sounded like a bag of door knobs falling down the stairs and if the lyrics are good I’ll be like, ‘This is the best song I’ve ever heard.’
In my writing I’ve always been drawn to specificity. Like in my song, ‘2Shy’ and I say, ‘Walking down the Uxbridge Road. Headphones on, cigarette rolled.’ Not many people know Uxbridge Road but for me it has the opposite effect to what Finneas is describing. When things are very general I don’t feel connected because it could be anyone. Even if I am listening to someone specifically and it’s clearly not me or an experience I’ve had, I can relate it to an experience I’ve had. Often I’ll have people come to me and say, ‘Oh this song reminds me of this’ and it’s nothing to do with what the songs about. But I think that detail in all forms of writing is just really beautiful.
When I am reading literature the lines that always stop me in my tracks are just almost childlike in their simplicity. Cassandra Jenkins’ record was really the first one I could listen to after coming back from a musical wilderness. There’s one song called ‘Ambiguous Norway’ talking about the loss of a friend. There’s this lyric, ‘You’re gone. You’re everywhere.’ It’s such a simple way of describing someone who has died. It’s like if you suggested that line to someone they might have said, ‘Oh no we have to talk about something in a more ephemeral way.’

My favourite song on the album so far is ‘If You Don’t Believe in Love.’ Can you tell us more about it?
I wrote ‘If You Don’t Believe In Love’ and ‘Leonard Street’ with Maverick Sabre and Ed Thomas. I loved working with them because it was the first session I’d done in a really long time where we didn’t open a laptop. We sat together playing guitars and instruments, just constructing a song.
Obviously it’s a love song, a duet with Helado Negro and it’s kind of funny to me that I am duetting with a guy on a love song. I should be like, ‘Ok we’re going to get another lady on and make it a lesbian duet.’ But I just really love the people who feature, Becca, Roberto and Cassandra, they were all people whose music I’d really fallen in love with in the last few years. It’s always a bit of a risk when you ask because you’re like, ‘I don’t know whether our voices will go together.’ But often when you have really different timbres and different textures of vocals, it just works well.
This sounds so cheesy but one of the things my partner, Pauline, and I like to do if we’ve had a bad day is put on an old soul record and really badly slow-dance together. It always makes us feel really happy. So I really wanted to make a little song for me and Pauline to slow dance to.

The first single, ‘Recognise’, is so beautiful as well. For me it definitely has a Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush feel to it. A comment on YouTube compared it to the Donna Lewis classic, ‘I love you, Always Forever.’ What other comparisons have you had?
I think the drums definitely make people go to Phil Collins which is obviously very Peter Gabriel through association. Just because they are big gated 80s rimshots. So I think I’ve definitely had that. I’ve definitely had a few people say Kate Bush which I am not mad at. I think it’s that line, about coffee and a good book that is my best Kate impression.

You’ve mentioned before about being influenced by 80s-era Madonna and Janet. But I feel that influence is less present on this album right?
I think with every album those influences get quieter much to the chagrin of some listeners who hope I go back in that direction. With every album I go back a decade so hopefully on Album Five I’ll be doing medieval Gregorian chants. But I think there are little strokes of the 80s on songs like ‘Recognise’ and ‘World’s Worst Girlfriend’ which is the poppiest, cheekiest number.

I wanted to talk about the running order as well because it feels like the second half is lighter and more accessible perhaps. How was organising that for you?
You know what? This was the most difficult album for me to sequence. On both previous albums I always knew what was going first and which was going last. The problem with this one was that I hadn’t written a song that was like, ‘White light’ or ‘Skyline be mine.’ Also I didn’t want to do that again because I’ve done it twice. Both of those albums also had intros too. I didn’t do that this time either. I played with a lot of different options. In the end we went for the opposite of what we had always done with closers. I wanted to put the smallest song last.
As an opener ‘Tokyo’ is a weird one. It’s quite experimental, strange and odd with that piano sample. Musically it leaves you a bit on edge. But I like that! Haha…Tokyo was also the last place I toured so it made sense temporally, even though it’s essentially about me crying and not knowing where I belong – although I had quite a nice time in Japan! But I felt like that would be a nice way to open a record about sadness.

‘World’s Worst Girlfriend’ is a poppier moment on the album. Did it start out that way?
Yes, always and we thought when recording it, ‘Oh this is going to be a challenge because the record is not super poppy.’ You could produce that song in so many ways. It could be super electronic, it could be super clean. It could feel really Swedish which would sound great but it wasn’t going to fit in the world of this album. We wanted it to feel 80s but not modern, shiny, super inspired. It was a challenge but I think we got it right.
I remember writing the song and coming up with the hook, ‘I don’t want to be the world’s worst girlfriend.’ It felt like it was so bad that it was amazing. It’s very silly. It’s about me being a hermit and not wanting to leave the house because I am anxious and would rather be in my pyjamas. I think it’s great that it has that sense of humour and self-awareness.

I am going to a Dungeon Synth show tonight. I feel like as a gamer it might pique your interest?
I’m very much aware of it on Tik Tok. I don’t know if I am just being sent all that stuff because I’m running around in armour for this album. I love all of that. I saw that yesterday Burberry launched a new campaign and it was someone in a full suit of armour riding a micro scooter. I was sent it by a friend and in fact anytime anyone is in armour now I am sent it. I have never been so on trend in all my life and it has nothing to do with being cool. It’s literally because I am a nerd and this is what I like. It just so happens that the fashion world has decided that this is a thing right now.

Finally we are named after the biggest-selling single of 2001 so we always ask what is your favourite Mariah Carey song?
Oh that is so hard. I think it might be ‘We Belong Together.’ I remember as a teenager my twin and I would make silly videos of things like just putting toothpaste on a toothbrush whilst listening to ‘We Belong Together.’

‘Recognise‘ and ‘Richardson‘ are both out now.
The album I Got Too Sad For My Friends is out 30th May and available to pre-order now.
Shura plays London’s Bush Hall on 10th/11th June. Tickets onsale now via Ticketweb.