Shura - I Got Too Sad For My Friends

On third record ‘I Got Too Sad For My Friends’, a bohemian Shura finds herself isolated in once densely populated cities (‘Leonard Street’, ‘Tokyo’, ‘Richardson’). Any attempts to resist this post-pandemic psyche - where anxious urgency battles depressive lethargy - are futile, and Shura succumbs to social anxiety, insecurity and agoraphobia. At times she obsessively, compulsively fears death: “I asked you if you thought I was dying / Got mad at you when you said no / Like I’d rather die just so I could be right / And you were trying to prove me wrong” (‘Online’). At others she cares so little for herself she won’t even put on new clothes (‘World’s Worst Girlfriend’). Later, she smashes these inconsistencies together - “If I die, at least I won’t have to pick out a shirt to wear” (‘Bad Kid’, featuring Becca Mancari) - capturing the illogical indifference of depression.

But it’s still animated and dimensional, all existing under a warm ‘70s-to-’80s, folk-meets-synth-pop lens, which feels to be a natural direction for her sound to have taken: where ‘Leonard Street’ conjures psychedelic and introspective ABBA sensibilities, ‘Recognise’ summons the grief-stricken melancholia of Pet Shop Boys. “What if I recognise I’m alive?” she asks. Though there’s a helpless frustration at the heart of ‘I Got Too Sad…’, it’s far more tender in its retrospection to be unforgiving of herself. Touchingly, hope is always plentiful. ‘I Got Too Sad…’ promises there’s always sunshine at the end of perseverance (‘Ringpull’): “They say it’s like the weather / One day, you’ll find it’s better.”