When I get on my Zoom call with Shura I’m immediately mortified by my setup – a grainy MacBook camera, grim lighting and a messy bedroom in the background embarrassingly juxtaposed to Shura’s HD top-left camera angle and ring light. The perils of interviewing someone who became a streamer during the pandemic, I guess.
A lot has changed for Shura since her last album, 2019’s forevher – and not just the streaming. Having made a name for herself in 2015 with songs about heartbreak and sad-girl sapphic longing like ‘Touch’ and ‘2Shy’, forevher was about falling in love. Now, after six years, a brief career as a pro Twitch streamer, and an internal struggle with with mental health and isolation, her new album, I Got Too Sad For My Friends, bravely shines a light on those parts of ourselves we turn away from, feelings of shame and selfishness around our mental health. Crucially, IGTSFMF seeks to soothe and soften those strains while you find a way out. Filled with cuttingly emotive expressions of loneliness and isolation, it addresses difficult feelings from a position of love and positivity. This record lets you be the little spoon, it’s the fabulously sapphic image of sitting in an armchair ‘with a cat sitting on your lap’.
Part therapy, part cultural digest, our conversation ranged between topics like isolation, having a brick for a brain, delayed gratification, fancying video game characters and becoming a muscle mommy.
There’s a lot going on in the album artwork: the armour, the mountains, the gremlins, the Kurt Cobain fit… What were some of the influences feeding into it?
I sort of joke that it’s giving Joan of Arc top, and then Ellie from The Last Of Us bottom. I think that the first sort of obvious one is a game I played called Baldur’s Gate 3, which took over my life. I just sort of fell in love with the idea of myself as this slightly chaotic gnome Bard.
I had also just read The Little Prince and was absolutely devastated by it, like this is not a children’s book. There’s this really striking image of him stood on top of a mountain range, and then the themes of the record are anxiety, loneliness and sadness and feeling myself disappearing. Obviously, Baz Lurman’s Romeo + Juliet is also in the back of my mind there. I think there’s almost not a lesbian on the planet who hasn’t at some point wanted to dress up as Leonardo DiCaprio in that film.
[In the album artwork] I’m ready to fight against these monsters or demons or whatever it is that I encounter, except my armour is nowhere useful, I’m not covering any vital organs. The idea is that the monsters are kind of not really there – they’re part of your internal world.
In the title and throughout the album, you address really difficult and familiar feelings directly. How did it feel to turn and face those feelings?
It’s true that extreme emotions make it easy to write, but part of my experience of being sad and alone actually meant I couldn’t write at all. Of course, that started with the pandemic. I was discombobulated that I couldn’t listen to music.
I remember calling my friend Pip [the singer-songwriter Ladyhawke] and just being like, ‘Pip I can’t write’. I remember saying, ‘I feel like my brain is a brick. It’s just solid. Nothing is – there’s no movement in there’. And I remember them saying, ‘Shu, I felt like this so many times. You will absolutely write music again, do not worry about this’. And that was really comforting, actually, to hear from someone who is a friend and who I respect. So initially quite difficult. Once I knew I had enough songs to be like, ‘Oh, an album is happening,’ it was a lot easier.
You mention the lockdown era and the difficulties which you faced then as an artist. I remember you pivoting to streaming during that era – why?
I started streaming video games on Twitch in the pandemic as a way to stay connected with fans that felt less strange to me than playing music to an empty room on Instagram Live. I also tried the Instagram Live route but it just felt alien to me since so much of performing is an exchange of energy between the audience and the person performing.
There’s not a lesbian on the planet who hasn’t at some point wanted to dress up as Leonardo DiCaprio in Romeo + Juliet.
This album explores the unglamorous side of mental health, and I think a lot of people are going to relate. I don’t want this to feel like therapy but is there anything you would like people to take from it?
I do hope that it brings people comfort, but I also actually hope it brings people joy in the process. Musically there’s definitely some less joyful [moments] but, overall, it’s quite joyful and warm. I hope it’s like an armchair for people to curl up in with a cat sitting on their lap, where they can stare wistfully out of the window and cry, or maybe also feel excited about the future.
I can see that mix of emotions in the song “World’s Worst Girlfriend”. It hits you with very difficult lines like “maybe I got too sad for my friends” but it’s followed with the hyperbolic, almost comedic, “I don’t wanna be the world’s worst girlfriend”.
And you can see the merch, right? I was like, I need to wear a cap with World’s Worst Girlfriend on it.
How did the musical side of the album come into being?
I think the first record that I really could listen to after I had that period of not being able to write, not being able to listen, was An Overview on Phenomenal Nature by Cassandra Jenkins [who features on I got too sad for my friends]. It felt like an armchair record and I was so comforted by it.
I’d made a decision to make an album that was the type of record I wanted to listen to. I wanted it to kind of spoon me. I wanted to be spooned. I wanted to be little spoon. We made a decision to record this live with musicians in one room, playing all together in takes, which I’d never done before. I remember the first day of recording and setting up in The Pool [recording studio] in London and just being really overwhelmed by emotion and on the verge of tears a lot of the time, partly because I almost never thought I’d be here [recording music] again.
Let’s talk about the soaring ethereal lead single about staying in, ‘Recognise’. Was that always going to be the first single?
Yes, and then no, and then yes. I wanted it to kind of lead people and welcome people, to make people a little bit excited, a little bit unsure. I love being a bit of a troll at this stage of the record, I’m a big believer, for myself, in deferred gratification. I’m always the last person to open their Christmas presents. I like knowing something good is coming. So this is like my peak, where I’m the most mean to my fans ever. I like the idea of kind of, yeah, drawing [my fans] in and making them excited, but also not letting them know where we will go from here.
A little bird told me you’re becoming a muscle mommy…
So I thought it was going to happen really quickly. But, it turns out, getting muscles takes so long and you have to eat so much chicken. At one point, I was like, ‘Wait, how many whole chickens have I eaten this year?’ I started feeling really bad for chickens, who I love. I love chickens. They’re such cute creatures. I’d also had some health scares as a result of Covid. Being told that your lungs have the capacity of a 70-year-old woman when you’re in your 30s is quite a frightening experience. I’d started going back to the gym and taking that quite seriously to try and get my lungs to be back to somewhere good. Then, in the middle of all this generic health stuff, I watched Love Lies Bleeding, and wow, just wow – what a film. I was like, Wait, so you can be more than fit? You can be like a muscle mummy!? Since then I’ve been training quite seriously, several times a week and lifting. But I think the final evolution of myself as a muscle mummy Pokémon is years in the future.
My favourite Lioness is Leah Williamson, I met her at an Arlo Parks concert. We had a lovely little chat and agreed to play five-a-side.
I also obviously loved Love Lies Bleeding, do you have any other sort of lesbian media that you’ve become obsessed with?
Arcane: everyone in my Discord was talking about it and excited about it because it was gay. My other friend was messaging me about it being like, ‘Is it okay if I fancy a cartoon?’ I loved Agatha All Along. I do love a little gay treat from time to time. Last year was quite a gay year as well. There was also that film with Ayo Edebiri and who else? And it was kind of like high school–
Bottoms?
Yeah, Bottoms was great. And musically, you know, Chappell Roan, having that meteoric rise. There was a time, I think 2015, when I first started releasing new music and there weren’t many of us. Now, it’s like I never have to wait for a gay thing [to come out], which is so nice, there’s always a new gay thing around the corner, which I think is exactly as it should be.
And women’s football too is getting a lot of well-deserved attention – I heard you played for Man City as a teenager?
From U9 onwards. I was scouted at a primary school tournament, and I played until U16. Then I discovered guitar and I was like, ‘Wait, I can be inside in winter and not in a T-shirt and shorts and maybe people will think I’m cool and fancy me?’ That [last bit] didn’t happen. It did later, but not then. When I watched the England women’s team win the Euros I was so happy and I was so proud. And there was this tiny little footballer Shura, who was like, ‘Oh, what if I’d carried on? Maybe I could have been there.’
Who’s your favourite Lioness?
That’s really difficult. But I have to say Leah Williamson, because I met her at an Arlo Parks concert. We had a lovely little chat and agreed to play five-a-side. I know that’s never going to happen but, in my brain, it’s going to happen.
