Shura

Shura's taken a stroll across the rolling hills, through the bracing wind, and returned with a chamber pop opus that is steeped in bucolic melancholia but spurred on with an 80s sheen that gives it that addictive impetus that keeps us going back for more.

A pastoral blend of chamber pop, sixties folk and campfire Americana, Shura’s 3rd studio album builds her introspective songwriting out into a vast landscape – more tranquil than the soulful bounce of ‘forevher’, and more rustic than the brooding synth-pop of her 2016 debut, ‘Nothing’s Real’. That landscape is both sonically comforting and representative of her headspace during the writing process, which was one of sadness and isolation. The itinerant emotional state is mirrored in the artwork, which sees Shura perched on a Welsh mountainside in a baggy jumper, ripped jeans, Converse, and cobbled-together armour that covers everything except her vital organs – part Kurt Cobain, part Leonardo DiCaprio in Romeo + Juliet. The image references the French novella The Little Prince, which follows a young boy who sets out to explore other planets to cure his loneliness.

Though it’s an album exploring themes of depression and loneliness, ‘I Got Too Sad For My Friends’ is far from dejected it retains Shura’s usual crystalline sound and precision while introducing a different kind of warmth and earthiness. Approached like an “old school record” that captures a performance rather than a production, much of the album was recorded live, with the keys, bass, guitar, and drums all tracked as a single performance. The vocals were done separately – with the exception of soft funk track Ringpull.

The decision to explore a wider breadth of instruments for the first time came from a sense of urgency that was, in part, prompted by the pandemic. “It made me think: this could be over at any minute. I could never get to make a record again. I could never tour again. So my approach to this record was like, if I never get to do this again, what do I want to make sure I've done? I want to record live. I want to work with textures I've never worked with before. I want to dress up as a gnome bard knight and climb a mountain in Wales, regret it, and have no one else to blame except for myself because I'm freezing,” she laughs. “So even though it’s not necessarily a maximalist record in terms of how it sounds, the approach was maximal joy for me making it… which is hilarious, because it's about being miserable!”