It’s easy to trace a narrative thread between the title of Shura’s new album and its cover artwork: I Got Too Sad for My Friends, so I dressed myself up in insufficient armour, ripped jeans, a jumper, Converse, and headed off to the mountains. And then it begs the question: Are the little gremlins circling our protagonist friends, manifestations of nervous catastrophizing, or remnants of a creative imagination that never stops running when we’re kids? After the pandemic halted the momentum of the British singer-songwriter’s previous album, Forevher, she found herself at a roadblock – unable to listen to, much less write, music that inspired her – but also a different kind of community in video game streaming. She’d chased her dream of living in New York, albeit at a time of stifled human interaction, before moving back to London without realizing that’s what she was doing. I Got Too Sad for My Friends not only offsets some of the encroaching loneliness with guest features from Cassandra Jenkins, Helado Negro, and Becca Mancari, but blankets its accompanying despair with rich swirls of sound and textured instrumentation, even upping the tempo on some of the pop songs. Call it a counter-narrative: I Got Too Sad for My Friends sounds like a joyful experience. 

We caught up with Shura to talk about video games, The Little Prince, Brooklyn, and other inspirations behind her first album in six years.

Video games: Baldur’s Gate 3, The Last of Us

While Baldur’s Gate is maybe a more obvious reference because of the aesthetics of the record, I certainly remember The Last of Us, particularly the second game, being a huge character in my life. I’d just moved to New York, and we landed to the news that gatherings over a certain number of people were now canceled. And I was like, “Oh, okay. I picked a very interesting time to live here, I guess.” A few months later, the game came out. I had loved the first game. I’d never played it – it’s a bit too frightening for me, but I had watched my twin brother play it, and it was like watching a great TV show. I knew that I couldn’t really watch him play it because we weren’t living together anymore, and I was alone, so I was like, “Guess I’m gonna have to get over it.” [laughs]

When something’s bad, some people go for an antidote, so some people will try to listen to happy music when they’re sad. I’m the opposite. I want to wallow. If we’re gonna be sad, we’re gonna really feel it to the extreme. I remember playing this game and watching every single apocalypse movie that ever has been made, whether it was Contagion or Deep Impact. I was really drawn to that.

How was your relationship with music at the time? Was there a similar impulse?

I couldn’t listen to music. It was really weird. When something becomes your job, your relationship to that thing certainly changes, so I’ve definitely gone through phases where I don’t look for new music as much. Whereas as a teenager, it was either music that was brand new or music that was new to me, and I would be constantly trying to be a sponge. And I’ve certainly gone through periods, especially when I’m recording, where I tend not to listen because I really fall hard for records. And if I fall too hard, I get frightened that I’ll try to make my thing into something that it’s not supposed to be. So I try to remain neutral when I’m recording. With this, I couldn’t listen to any music. The only way I can describe it is: I felt awful for all musicians. Because I knew what I was experiencing – I’d had an album campaign and a tour that just disappeared, more or less overnight, and my brain was like, “I guess I threw that record in the bin.” All that love and care and blood, sweat, and tears, whatever it is that’s gone into all these records – there was something deeply distressing to me about that. I should’ve just worried about myself and maybe listened to some records – maybe would’ve been a bit nicer. [laughs] But yeah, I could only listen to podcasts, spoken word.

Did streaming video games offer some kind of alternative to that?

100%. At that time, we were being asked a lot to do Instagram Lives and do acoustic gigs in our living room. I’d done as much as I could to give it a vibe, and I remember doing one and I was just like, “I am literally singing at a wall.” Doing this performance made me feel more acutely depressed about not being able to do it the way we would’ve liked to have done it. I was playing The Last of Us, and my partner was like, “What about streaming?” I never watched a stream and was like, “Why would anyone do that?” We just put one on one evening, and within ten minutes, I was like, “I fully understand this.” It’s like a digital version of when you used to invite your friends over when you were 15 and play Mario Kart. I play the game, and I can read the screen, and I can talk to my fans, and they find it hilarious. It’s fun if you’re good. It’s fun if you’re bad. You can just be completely yourself. You don’t have to remember any lyrics. [laughs] I still have a Discord community as a result – I’m not streaming as regularly, but it’s this really beautiful community, and it really made sense at the time. 

What I will say about The Last of Us, the fact that there are zombies is the least interesting thing about it. I know people who aren’t gamers won’t necessarily know or really care about, but it was one of the first triple-A games – big studio games – where the lead character is explicitly written as queer. For me, that was a really cool thing. You know, I’ve played The Sims – I’ve been gay in The Sims, like a lot of queer people were gay in The Sims before they were gay in real life. [laughs] But to have it written that way, and it not be an option – it’s not that you can flirt with a person of the same sex – in a game of that kind of magnitude was really cool. 

The Little Prince

How did that come up as a reference point for the album artwork?

I was thinking about the aesthetics, and I was talking to my partner about them. I’d begun making a mood board, and there was Leonardo DiCaprio in Baz Luhrman’s Romeo and Juliet on there – that’s just an image that I’ve always loved. It was funny reading Cassandra’s inspirations, and I saw that that Romeo and Juliet came up. If you were a young person when that film came out, it just affected you. I’m half Russian, and I also had a lot of images that I’d scanned from illustrated children’s books. They had this quality to them where they were sort of rudimentary and quite childlike. So I started putting all these things together in a mood board to send to Gilad [Kaufman], the art director for the record, and my partner, who’s kind of a cultural sponge, was looking at it, and she’s like, “Have you read The Little Prince?” And I was like, “No, but obviously, I know about it.” She said, “You should read that.” And I went out that day, to my local bookstore, and it was there on display. I just started it that evening, finished that evening, and was really struck by it. 

Obviously, I knew it to be a children’s book. And yet if you read it as an adult, you realize it’s absolutely not a children’s book. Children can read it, and they’ll get stuff from it. But it’s a very profound book and meditation on so many things that I think was ruminating on during the writing process: the idea of trying to find something, someone, a place where you belong and feel at home; the isolation; the absurdity of human existence. But there was one image in particular that really struck me. I liked the idea of armor and the metaphor wearing armor, but not really armor that you would ever fight in – if you were gonna fight, you would wear armor that protected your head, your vital organs, you’re not gonna just sit there in pauldrons and be like, “I’m ready.” It might stop you breaking your arm, but that’s about it. [laughs] You know, you’re still gonna die.

It was this image of the little prince standing on top of a mountain with his little scarf blowing in the wind, on planet Earth, being told that Earth was full of people, and it’s the one place you can’t find anyone just because of where he’s landed. And I was like, “God, that really resonates with me.” Even though I was living at home with a partner who was incredibly supportive and who I loved and have many wonderful friends and amazing family, when I was at my lowest, it did feel a bit like standing on the moon alone, or standing in this place you’ve been told is lush and full of life – and I felt I couldn’t find any. I couldn’t find any life. I didn’t know where to look. I didn’t know that I was looking in the wrong place.

I really wanted to try and make sure that this scene of me wearing anachronistic armor and jeans was on top of a mountain. The reason I’msat on a rock is that we just couldn’t climb the mountain in time. [laughs] It just took three hours just to get there with all the gear, and we were like, “Well, this rock will have to do.” Actually, I’m sort of pleased because I think it’s a little bit different – there’s a body of water, and the rock’s sort of interesting. I sort of imagined something a bit more desperate and lonely-looking, and there’s something about this cover that was maybe more stoic than I was imagining, which I think is also beautiful.

There are also these imaginary creatures – “little gremlins,” I think Gilad called them – that made me also think of the imaginary as a place of deep anxiety rather than innocence and dreams. Like on ‘Online’, when you keep singing, “I can imagine.” 

I think that’s the issue with my imagination at times, is that it’s very focused on all the bad things that can happen. With the creatures, there’s no way of necessarily knowing whether they’re nice; it’s even ambiguous in the artwork. Some of them maybe look a bit scary and some of them are not necessarily bad gremlins, but they’re gremlins nonetheless. And I think that’s the thing we often do with anxiety – we take something that is not a threat necessarily, but we make it so, or we react to it as if it is so, which I found interesting to me.

Brooklyn

I know you had to move back to the UK at some point while making the album. How far into the process were you?

Not super far. I didn’t realize I was moving back. I think that’s the weirdest part. I was leaving to go back and do some music and do some writing, and I just hadn’t really checked and thought about the implications of that. I’d sort of seen that basically you couldn’t really come back to America – I had a visa, but you had to prove there was something in place, that you were part of a company earning over a certain threshold and that your travel was essential. I could have maybe tried, but I hate flying. The idea of going all the way back and being like, “No, you can’t come here.” That’s sort of what ‘Leonard Street’ is about – it was liminal in the sense that I was supposed to move there, and then, when I did, where I moved to didn’t really exist as I knew it anymore. And then I went home and didn’t get to say goodbye.

There was a thought that certainly occurred – again, this is part of the anxious catastrophizing, the “I can imagine” part – which was when the Uber arrived. In fact, before the Uber arrived, I went around the whole apartment, to really be present and really take it all in because I was like, “What if I never come back?” It was the closest I get to being, I guess, spiritual – I was like, “I really must scan it and take a photograph in my mind.” I remember sitting in the cab, waving to my partner, thinking this might be the last time I take a cab from this location to the airport. Τhere was a fear there.

I’d been going to New York and Brooklyn for years before I finally moved, and I loved it. My social life was quite rich there – I almost knew Brooklyn better than I knew London, it felt. I had places I would go and get a coffee and spend half a day there, and there would always be someone to talk to and hang out with. And then when I finally moved, that was no longer really available to me. So I feel like I didn’t quite finish the thought of what it would be to live in Brooklyn. I really look forward to going back. I don’t know if I’ll ever move there again; I certainly wouldn’t be opposed to it. Maybe not for a few years.

You mentioned ‘Leonard Street’, which has these lyrics that stood out to me: “I woke up in the winter like a bird in the spring/ I could see inside apartments full of people that I know I’ll never meet.” The way that you sing and frame it, to me, sounds like: I’ve moved away from this place, but I remember the possibilities and fullness of people. And that’s a different kind of grief.

Yeah, there’s a lot of grief on the record. I haven’t said it anywhere, but it’s nice that you should pick it out. It made me a bit emotional, actually, but that’s one of my favorite lyrics on the record. It’s probably also the most lyrical and indirect I’ve been – normally my lyrics are very matter-of-fact, I try not to wrap things in too much metaphor. But that was maybe the most opposite of that that I’ve ever been in a song. There’s so many ways of reading that line, which is why I like it. I think it works for me in the sense that it’s like finally getting here and it not being, in a quite literal sense, the right time to be here. I’m like, “Hi, guys,” and it’s the depth of winter and everyone’s inside and I’m like, “Oh, okay.”

For me, it’s also about sometimes being weirdly comfortable in hardship or being fulfilled by hardship – not as a compliment to my brain or myself, but I’ve always loved winter, for instance. I love being cold. I love the idea of wrapping up against the elements and facing them much more than I like the idea of wearing a T-shirt and being comfortable on a beach or whatever. There are slight instincts I have, I think, towards hardship. I wonder if that’s like a cultural thing I got from my mom – I don’t know. But I love that lyric, and I tend not to say it when people ask me what my favorite one is, because I feel like I just spend four hours waffling, and sometimes it’s just more fun for people to interpret it the way they want to. 

There’s another single where Brooklyn comes up, and it’s ‘Richardson’ with Cassandra Jenkins. Apart from the lyrical connection to Brooklyn, what did it mean for you to have artists from New York sing on this record?

One of the things I was so excited about moving to New York is that there are so many incredible musicians there. I was really sort of looking forward to connecting with them and shifting the perspective from where I was making music. I’d made a record in London, and I’d made a record about falling in love in New York, but I still made it in London, and I was ready in my life for a big adventure. Didn’t realize quite how big it was gonna be. [laughs]

Cassandra’s music is some of the first music that I could listen to when I began to start exploring the idea of listening to music again. I’m definitely a lyrics person in terms of enjoying music. I was always really struck by Cassandra’s way of saying things. She was a complete surprise to me in the sense that I went to a show and Okay Kaya was playing, who I love, and Cassandra was supporting. I remember just having this very visceral, in-the-room reaction of “Who the fuck is this, and why haven’t I ever listened to their music?” This was before An Overview on Phenomenal Nature came out. I was just completely struck by their music. And then Overview came out, and I think I only listened to that record for about a year. It became a reset for me. She’s so economical with what she’s saying and not saying, and what she’s letting you dream up as a result. 

And then, of course, there are the meditations on grief. I wasn’t grieving a person at the time, but I was grieving in other ways – grieving the end of an album campaign, grieving a move to a place that no longer felt like what I thought it would be, grieving the loss of a sense of self. Who was I in this moment if I wasn’t writing or making music? If I’m not doing that, then who am I? From the moment I first saw that show, I thought, this person is incredible, I’d love to work with them. We talked about it for a few years, and in the end, I just sent Cassandra a sort of “menu” of songs. I really wanted her to say yes, but it wasn’t necessarily helpful. I was like, “It could be this, it could be that. And if you don’t like this, it could always be that.” 

But Cassandra, being Cassandra, was much more chill about it. She said, “Let’s just book it. I’ll have a listen.” And then I think the day before we went in to record, she said, “Where I’m at right now, it feels like ‘Richardson’ is the one I’d like to hang onto.” It surprised me, but I’m so glad she picked that one. It feels like the perfect song for her to be on. Obviously, the connection to New York, but it being about that time in my life that was very much soundtracked by her. In a kind of cosmic full-circle way, we both really enjoyed that.

Desolate Landscapes/Cosmos

I’ve always been really upset with how math is taught in school. It’s all to do with money, how maths is taught here. I found it incredibly boring. But if someone had told me, math is how we get a person to space and back again, I’d have been like, “Holy shit. I’m gonna study maths.” There’s a world in which I would have quite liked being an astronaut. But I’ve always been in love with space. I’m not a religious person, so I think that’s the closest I get to spirituality is being in awe of space and the natural world. 

I love being in the mountains. After I finished my degree, I’d been reading a lot of Latin American magical realism, and I was determined to go there. So I went alone. I did an intensive two-week Spanish course in Bolivia, and then went trekking in the mountains. It felt like the closest I could get to space, to being an astronaut, because they are kind of alien landscapes to me; I hadn’t grown up in a mountainous country. I’m really interested in the beauty of vastness, because there’s a bit of fear as well.

I once did a sensory deprivation float around the time I finished the record. You’re in this completely dark tank, and there’s a ton of salt in there. It’s meant to be good for sleep, creativity, relaxation. And I literally felt like a fetus floating through the birth of the universe. I promise I wasn’t drunk and I had taken no drugs. [laughs] But it was that feeling of weightlessness, like, “I’d be happy to do this, actually.” Which is weird, because it’s like 2001, A Space Odyssey with the giant baby in the sky. I kind of felt like that baby, but I was comforted, whereas when I watch that film I’m highly disturbed.

Listening to your inner child

I thought I might never get to make a record again. So it was that selfish, childish thing of: I want all the sweets I can see in the sweet shop. I wanted to approach this record by doing all the things that either I wish I’d already explored or have never done and want to. I wanted to really make decisions that bring me immediate joy. So it was like, “I’ve never worked with clarinets – let’s do that. Let’s have woodwinds. Let’s all record live. Let’s sing live. Let’s play together.” All of my records until that point had been recorded in quite a disjointed way, very bedroom producer and then adding bits later and going in and rerecording all that stuff. Because I can imagine this being the last one – it may not, but just in case – the next one is not guaranteed, so what do you wanna do now? 

I think we often go, “What advice would you give to younger you?” And I was thinking, why do we assume that we always have advice for the younger version? What would my younger version tell me to do now? What if I flipped that? What if I’ve forgotten how to have fun? I was really interested in asking the me that wanted to be a musician when I was 13, who wasn’t a professional musician, “What do you wanna do?” We’re doing this now, so what do you wanna do? That’s definitely in the music, but it’s also completely in the artwork. I used to dress up in silly costumes all the time as a kid.

But it was funny hearing it framed back to me. When you do inner child work, it’s like, imagine a three-year-old version of yourself: You wake up, what are you gonna do? You’re gonna give them breakfast. Whereas if I as an adult, I might not make myself breakfast because I’m busy, I’m stressed. It’s like, “No. Make yourself breakfast. Look after yourself as if you were that person.” And then someone reframed it to me: “It sounds like three-year-old you carried you out of this period of depression. Rather than you saving yourself via your inner child, it sounds like your inner child was the hero.” And I’m like, “Thank you, tiny Shu, for realizing that you were the one that knew the way out.” Because I think grown up Shura had somewhat lost their way, and toddler Shu was like, “I got this!”

Her dad’s record collection

Were those also records you listened to as a child?

There were records I was definitely exposed to and that I have core memories of. My dad is a big lover of music. After a period, he stopped listening to new music, so he’s very much stuck in a certain era. But I remember growing up and listening to a lot of Simon & Garfunkel and James Taylor. To me, I was like, “Wow, this is from another world.” I remember him often sitting down and talking about songs and, especially with Simon & Garfunkel, talking about harmony. Harmony is such a big part of this record in a way that I’ve explored it a little bit on maybe the second album, not at all really on the first. But it was music that is satisfying, that resolves. The emotion doesn’t necessarily have to resolve, or the sentence doesn’t have to resolve, but musically, there’s a resolution. 

I was interested in playing with these topics that are quite difficult and often unresolved and often question marks or anxieties or things you can imagine are happening, but then having the bed in which they all live to be very comforting, to have all these layers of harmony. Going back to desolate landscapes or mountain ranges, they have a texture to them that’s so tactile. I don’t know how else to explain it, but whenever people say green is boring, I’m like, “Have you actually looked at grass? Have you looked at a have you looked at a tree recently?” [laughs] I was just in this world of wanting to work with natural-sounding things, hearing a clarinet and being like, “This kinda sounds like a person.” All these textures that I think I was soothing myself with bled onto the record. 

Memoir

I did an English literature degree, because I loved reading. I loved fiction. Went to South America because of, you know, a book that I loved. But weirdly, doing it as my degree somewhat extinguished the kind of love that I’d had for it as a kid. I think when you’re forced to read a book that’s 500 pages long in a week and then also write an essay about it, reading becomes a chore. So I found myself reading less and less fiction as an adult. I would occasionally pick up a nonfiction book – say I’d watch Chernobyl, then I’d read a book about that, and that’s fine.

To not read fiction is like not watering your brain. It’s like saying, “I don’t drink water,” in my opinion, as a creative person. To not read fiction is like, “Well, good luck if you’re not gonna water your brain in that way.” So at that time when I was really struggling to write anything, I found memoir – because it reads like a middle ground to me, if it has a bit of that magical realism element of, you’re not sure what’s truth and what’s a version of it. I’d read a lot of Maggie Nelson. I’d just read Olivia Laing’s Lonely City, which obviously, as an English person in New York feeling lonely, really struck me. 

It’s what led me to also write something. It wasn’t songs at first, but I was like, “I’m gonna keep a diary.” I never kept a diary in my life, I wish I had. I would start the diary most days with 10 objective observations, and then I would talk about the day that I’d had. Because also in that period of time when none of us were really doing very much of anything, it was very difficult to have a concept of how much time had passed or what you had done the day before because every day was a very similar thing. Except I found out when you keep a diary, it wasn’t. And actually, the days were really different when I kept it. Big things happened that I wouldn’t remember if I hadn’t kept a diary. With ‘America’, you have another case of police brutality, and then literally the very next day, Elon Musk is sending someone into space. I can’t write songs unless I find what I’m talking about interesting, and reading that back after feeding my brain with memoir, I started to go, “These two things are interesting. This is a story that I can tell.” I can talk about how we covered all the mirrors in the apartment because we were sick of seeing ourselves. And suddenly, I was interested in my own life again – and the observations about what I could see other people doing, what we were doing – enough to write.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Shura’s I Got Too Sad for My Friends is out May 30 via Play It Again Sam.