Recently Shura determined she wished to battle. Already in what she calls her Muscle Mummy period – partly impressed by the Kristen Stewart-starring, queer bodybuilding thriller Love Lies Bleeding – this buff new mindset concerned the singer, songwriter and producer studying jujitsu for the video for World’s Worst Girlfriend, the soft-pop spotlight of this month’s excellently titled third album, I Acquired Too Unhappy for My Associates.
Issues didn’t go to plan, nonetheless. In her fourth class, popping out of a roll, she felt her knee go pop. One MRI scan later, having feared a extra severe ligament tear, she was recognized with a knee downside often called Hoffa’s fats pad impingement. It means we’re assembly in a restaurant/file store hybrid a number of metres from the west London flat she shares along with her girlfriend. She jogs my memory that final time we spoke, across the launch of her 2016 main label debut, Nothing’s Actual, she couldn’t transfer her neck. Being a pop artist, it appears, is dangerous on your well being. “I performed soccer [for Manchester City from under 11 to under 16 level], I performed a great deal of sports activities and I’ve by no means had a severe harm – till now,” she says.
Issues have been emotionally painful, too. I Acquired Too Unhappy for My Associates was born out of the the other way up of the pandemic, then slowly created after a extreme bout of author’s block, earlier than being delayed by sickness. However its title additionally encapsulates a side of Shura’s persona. “There’s somewhat sense of humour to it however, on the identical time, when you look at it, it might be barely devastating,” the 36-year-old smiles. “Devastating in a enjoyable method.”
The seeds of I Acquired Too Unhappy for My Associates’s creation began with its predecessor, Forevher, an album exploring queer love over ethereal 70s grooves that Shura feels didn’t get the shot it deserved. After its launch in August 2019, its accompanying tour was reduce brief by Covid. At the moment, Shura – actual identify Aleksandra Denton – was dwelling in New York and too scared to depart the US in case she wasn’t allowed again in. She began to “pre-grieve” her dad and mom again in London, particularly her mum, who’s the topic of the brand new album’s emotional centrepiece, On-line. “Worrying is my interest,” Shura says, chewing some Nicorette gum (she’s been attempting to surrender vaping, which she began when she was giving up cigarettes). “I joke that if there’s one thing to fret about I’ll fear about it.”
She searched arduous for pleasure. When her musician buddies began organising digital live shows she figured she’d take part. She wished to make it work, too, even rearranging the vegetation in her condominium for “vibes … however there have been no vibes”. Ultimately, she gave up: “I was principally performing to a fucking fig tree.” Later, she’d discover a higher use of the web as a streamer on gaming platform Twitch, misplaced in “the horniest recreation I’ve ever performed in my life”, Baldur’s Gate 3 (“You may choose your character’s genitalia,” she says. “There’s three totally different penis choices.”)
It wasn’t simply dwell music that was making her unhappy; immediately all music was off the desk. Efficiency was her job and each tune was a reminder of what she was dropping. Having beforehand been dropped by Polydor after Nothing’s Actual failed to satisfy its industrial expectations, she additionally began taking up the burden of an trade in turmoil. “Additionally I simply couldn’t write,” she says. “I had nothing to say. I’d be speaking to my companion going: ‘Perhaps that’s all I will ever supply to the world.’ I believe if that had been it, it will have been actually unhappy as a result of it was like I had one and a half goes.”
Shortly after releasing a deluxe model of Forevher in early 2021, and shifting again to London, she was dropped once more, this time by the indie label Secretly Canadian. Shura says she hadn’t been shocked at being dropped by Polydor, who signed her on the peak of music-blog affect, after her tactile, SoundCloud-only 2014 debut single Contact went viral. Having taught herself manufacturing by way of YouTube tutorials whereas working as a video editor, she discovered the main label ecosystem alienating and intimidating, and he or she was clearly an odd match. When she was being touted round numerous labels, she remembers one asking her what her “factor” was. “They mentioned: ‘Clear Bandit play classical devices, so is your factor like: Hello, I’m in a beanie.’” She appears to be like agog, pulling at her – you guessed it – beanie. Ultimately, after signing to Polydor, she determined her factor was being “stressed”.
The second, most up-to-date, label departure – this time from an indie – stung, nonetheless. “I discuss to my musician buddies now and I’m like: ‘Look, when you’re dropped, come to me,’” she laughs. “That’s my expectation: somebody offers me some cash to make a file after which they’re like: ‘Oh that was a nasty concept.’” She pauses. “However it was really fairly painful. Like, ‘By the way in which, I do know it’s a little bit of a pandemic and you haven’t any revenue however, you already know, bye.’”
Shura’s means to search out solace in difficult instances extends to the album’s sonic palette. Whereas lyrically the album is saturated with the pandemic’s sense of uncanny – the one Richardson is about Shura taking laps around her small condominium “to really feel the air on my face”, whereas different songs contact on loneliness, panic and dislocation – musically it appears like a heat hug. Recorded dwell with a small band, it leans into 60s Americana, all honeyed harmonies, wealthy organ and the mild pitter-patter of drums. “Writing-wise,” she says, “I met myself the place I used to be listening-wise.”
It was the tactile songs of US singer-songwriter Cassandra Jenkins that helped Shura fall again in love with music. “It was the proper file for that point,” she says of Jenkins’s intimate An Overview on Phenomenal Nature album. “I might curl up into it and it simply comforted me.” Jenkins provides backing vocals to Richardson, and even makes a cameo in our interview when one among her songs gently wafts out of the cafe’s audio system. The perpetually fidgety Shura immediately sits bolt upright. “Fuck off! She’s right here. Cassandra, that’s so good of you to show up. Hello.”
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Shura jokes that with every album she’s slowly shifting again a decade. “So Nothing’s Actual is 80s, Forevher was barely extra 70s, and this is a little more 60s,” she says. “My subsequent one might be Gregorian chanting, so I can maintain my armour for that one as nicely.” Ah sure, the armour. The art work for I Acquired Too Unhappy for My Associates finds Shura sitting on a rock within the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons), sporting armour over her on a regular basis garments and searching for a battle that by no means comes.
It was semi-inspired by Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet and the way “a number of lesbians of a sure age” both fancy its star Leonardo DiCaprio or “need to be him, or need to be a girl that appears like him”. The armour has a a lot greater significance, too. “[During the pandemic] I discovered that I used to be doing stuff that I believed was defending me from ache or unhappiness, that completely made issues worse; by retreating, by reaching out to my buddies much less and isolating myself additional. So right here I’m in armour, able to battle, however what’s my armour defending?”
As she begins to develop extra animated, these gym-toned arms reveal a fragile sword tattoo in honour of the brand new file. She will get one for every album, she explains, which confuses me after I spot a drawing of a jolly, spherical character. “Oh, that’s only a pleased potato,” she laughs. After I recommend she’s simply let slip the title of album 4, she smiles, and permits herself to look to a future she thought was gone: “It’s that or Hoffa’s fats pad impingement.”
I Acquired Too Unhappy for My Associates is out now.
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