Shura Found Joy in Sadness

Shura Found Joy in Sadness

Jan 22, 2025

It’s fitting that Shura pops onto the Zoom screen in a gaming chair, bathed in purplish light. The British artist has spent much of the past five years inside playing video games, escaping our brutal, pandemic-filled reality through the immersive fantasy game, Baldur’s Gate 3. For Shura, warlocks and monsters seemed relatively quaint compared to what was happening outside her window in 2020 New York City.

As the world transformed into one of pandemonium and shutdowns, Shura struggled to write new music. It didn’t help that she was licking her wounds from the abrupt ending of her tour, which was canceled mid-way due to COVID. In the shock, silence and isolation of the time, she began to stream on Twitch as a way to keep in touch with her dedicated audience who had long turned to her heart-heavy pop music as a balm. Many of her fans enjoyed this virtual side quest, but eventually, it was time to get back to work: “[My fans] were like, ‘Okay, hurry the fuck up. Someone lock up [her] PlayStation please,’” she tells PAPER, laughing.

The result of her emotionally arduous return to music is I Got Too Sad For My Friends (out in May via Play It Again Sam),an intimate portrait of an artist fighting to remain connected to the world during the lonely days of the pandemic. Its title popped up in the writing process: “On ‘Richardson’ — which is the first song I wrote for the record — I sing, ‘I got too down around my friends/ It was slow, but they stopped answering/ So I stopped talking,’” she recalls. “I think that the most disorientating part of this sadness is you feel like you’re a burden to your friends because whenever you’re talking to them, you’re talking about how miserable you are.” Shura’s isolation and anxiety led her to “censor herself,” she says, but her need for connection persisted: “I was like, Why am I making myself quieter when what I really need is to be yelling, ‘Help! I need help!’

Maybe she did call out for help, but instead of the plea coming out as a scream, it came out as this set of 11 songs: all equal parts tender, broken, hopeful and searching. There’s pain here, but the uplifting feeling of putting your life back together also shines through, because in the end, this process of exploring her mental, emotional landscape became a joyous one: “It's a really sad record that I'm approaching with a lot of fun,” she shares.

A lot of that fun can be heard in the music itself. Whereas in the past, she wrote collaboratively and built her songs piece-by-piece with a producer, this time she flipped the process. She wrote alone and recorded the record quite traditionally, tracking the songs live with musicians in a studio. “I remember the first day of tracking being incredibly emotional,” she shares. “I was almost in tears coming back into the control room. I would listen like, Is that us? I couldn't believe it. We sounded so good. I was like, this is magic.

The miracle of their band’s chemistry wasn’t the only thing that tugged on Shura’s heartstrings. “I released my debut, Nothing’s Real, with Polydor, and then my next album, forevher, on Secretly Canadian. I didn’t know where my next home would be,” she says. “I didn’t know If I'd ever be in a studio again, so to be back in the studio and doing it this way with incredible players... it was really moving to be part of a group of people who were all working to create something beautiful based on silly songs that I wrote about being sad.”

But even with that glimmering magic, life still brought its obstacles. Her decision to record the album in London, and the reality of pandemic-related travel restrictions, meant that she found herself suddenly unable to return to New York City — the city she had been living in for years with her partner. “When I left New York, I didn't know that I was never going to be in my apartment again,” Shura says. “I remember getting into the Uber and thinking, I really need to look at it and try to create a photograph in my mind, because I might not come back. But then at the same time, I was like, But that's ridiculous,” she shares.“Once I knew I couldn't come back, I remember asking my partner to FaceTime me so we could say bye to all these parts of the apartment.” When she says it, it seems as if she’s still shocked at the turn of events.


A drastic, unplanned move across the Atlantic; the global and personal crises brought by the pandemic; and then the joyous collaboration of creating the new album: all of these experiences — so emotionally disparate — contributed to a project that is defined by its deep and shifting feelings. You can hear those deep feelings via each of the album’s component parts: there’s Shura’s voice, marked by its whispery timbre, her lyrics, which always cut to the heart of the matter, and then the music, whose groove lends buoyancy to Shura’s heartfelt words.

The production, done by Luke Smith, is both spacious and detailed. Her prior two records were produced by Joel Pott, but the existential questions provoked by the pandemic and the instability of the music industry inspired Shura to take a leap into the unknown. “I approached this record like, ‘What do I do that I've never done before? What if I never get to do this again?’” she tells us. “I love working with Joel. We have an amazing musical chemistry. But I knew very early that I wanted to go on an adventure,” which also meant some inevitable discomfort. “I’m a hermit, so discomfort isn’t something that comes naturally to me,” she shares with a knowing smiling. But even though the process was scary, there was a giddiness in the new approach. “It's a really sad record that I approached with a lot of fun,” she beams.

That mix of solace and euphoria can be heard throughout the whole record, but especially on “Recognise,” the album’s first single, out today. “Who said being sad is not a crime?/ Because I’m bad so I lock myself inside (with a coffee and a good book),” she sings atop a wash of ambience as a bass line begins to churn. The song’s crescendo is both deconstructed and anthemic: tom toms pound with a wink towards ‘80s pop, piano and synth chords shimmer in surprising flourishes, a choir of voices sing in soft power. But even with all these bells and whistles, the song is lush with space; the ambience which begins the song remains like a cloud of light and feeling.

Throughout “Recognise,” Shura sings the same refrain: “Is it selfish I’m not sure.” It speaks to the challenge of retreating from the world. Sometimes isolation is needed for recovery, but at other times, solitude can indeed be destructive. “I remember conversations with my therapist around my first album, which is when I first started to have panic attacks,” Shura recalls. “I remember her asking me whether I was attached to the idea of myself as an anxious person, and whether that was preventing me from becoming confident.” Shura refers to her first album, Nothing’s Real, as her “John Hughes era.” The album deployed tropes of “high school romance and unrequited love.” It featured the breakout single, “Touch,” which changed her life, but the success had some side effects. “I'd written this narrative through my music about how I'm an anxious person and I have panic attacks," she says. "I was almost holding on to things as character traits, as if I'd written myself into a play. And now I had to live up to this character. But we're multitudes. We evolve and we shift. And yes, I will always struggle with anxiety to some degree. But that doesn't mean I can't have periods of confidence and happiness.”

Ironically enough, an album with “sad” in its title may reflect such a period of confidence. I Got Too Sad For My Friends could be read as a sentence that ends with a period. Or it could be read as a phrase that ends with an ellipsis. There’s always more to the story.

Photography: Sophie Williams