Shura dives deep into depression, disconnection, and rediscovery on her stunning third album ‘I Got Too Sad for My Friends,’ a record that transforms isolation into connection through some of her most intimate, emotionally fearless songwriting yet. In conversation with Atwood Magazine, the British artist opens up about making peace with vulnerability, honoring her inner child, and learning to let go.

Stream: “World’s Worst Girlfriend” – Shura

A lot of this record feels like honoring my inner child – writing songs on a guitar, dressing up as a tiny superhero, going on an adventure.

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There’s a quiet kind of devastation running through I Got Too Sad for My Friends.

Shura’s third album is not a record of grand gestures, but of small ruptures – of relationships fraying in slow motion, of retreat turning into silence, of grief showing up uninvited in bedrooms, taxis, and texts that go unanswered. Written after a prolonged period of isolation and creative burnout, these songs feel like dispatches from the edge of recognition: Deeply introspective, emotionally driven storytelling dressed in warm melodies and sweet indie pop soundscapes. But the heart – and the humanity – of Shura’s lived experiences shines through. I Got Too Sad for My Friends is a gentle, unflinching reckoning with depression, identity, and disconnection: A record that doesn’t chase catharsis, so much as it sits with the weight of being human, letting the hurt speak in soft, unguarded tones.

Released May 30^th, 2024 via Play It Again Sam, I Got Too Sad for My Friends finds Shura charting a new course through familiar terrain. Where 2016’s critically acclaimed debut album Nothing’s Real pulsed with brooding synth-pop and 2019’s sophomore effort Forevher glowed with soulful romanticism, the British singer/songwriter and producer’s third album trades polish for presence: Earthy textures, live recordings, and the quiet intimacy of “chamber pop, sixties folk, and campfire Americana,” as she calls it. Much of the album was recorded live in-studio with her band, with vocals tracked separately – except on “Ringpull,” which preserves her original live take. “It’s not perfect,” she says, “but it captures a moment.” That desire, to honor feeling over perfection, becomes the album’s compass. Songs bloom gently, often carried by delicate keys, murmuring drums, and a voice that never forces its pain, but rather tells it plainly.

At its core, I Got Too Sad for My Friends is about what happens when we stop reaching out – when the weight we’re carrying makes us feel like a burden to the very people we love most. That tension surfaces again and again, both lyrically and in the album’s origin story.

“This record took me a really long time, for starters,” Shura – née Alexandra Lilah Denton – tells Atwood Magazine, chuckling to herself as she goes back to the beginning. “It documents a period of my life, when I was living in New York, having fallen in love with someone who lived there. Falling in love in America and sort of with America, but that being a very weird time to be in love there and with it. And then of course having to leave, sort of without realising I was leaving when I left – if that makes sense. I wrestled a little with not being able to write, not feeling inspired when the pandemic cut short the tour for the second record. It took a second to find my voice, and find things I found interesting to explore. The idea that instead of reaching out for help, I found myself increasingly isolated.”

“When I was struggling, I made the decision to make myself as small as possible, when what I needed to do was write SOS in the sand and set off a flare.” Instead, she pulled away. She stopped talking. The songs that emerged in the aftermath don’t ask for pity – they just tell the truth of what it felt like to disappear.

That sense of disappearance also shaped how Shura approached the record’s creation. After months of stasis, even starting again felt improbable.

“There was a period of time where I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to write another album, let alone be able to record one,” she admits. “So when it was finally clear to me that I had written an album and that I was going to be able to record it, I really wanted to approach it in a way that was new for me. I had this quite fatalistic idea that if I never got to do this again, I wanted to make sure I didn’t just do the same thing the same way three times. I had to go on an adventure that was exciting and maybe also a bit scary sometimes. I wanted to push myself and experience both the joy and discomfort that comes with that.”

That spirit of rediscovery courses through the album’s sonic palette. Though it may sound like a departure, I Got Too Sad for My Friends actually marks a return to the way Shura first began making music. “I’m definitely very thankful to my past self that forevher wasn’t nothing’s real 2,” she reflects. “I don’t know if my fans would agree, but I do think it reinforced early that I probably would just make whatever interested me, rather than what people expected. I don’t know if that would have happened if I’d stayed signed to a major label for the second record. So there was a blessing in there somewhere.”

She continues, “People won’t know this because the first thing they ever heard me do was synth pop, but in many ways this feels like a return to how I used to write, how I began: With a guitar in my bedroom. Quietly whispering into a microphone so no one could hear what I was singing. Secret attic songs,” she laughs. If her earlier albums charted new territory, this one is a homecoming of sorts; a self-reintroduction that honors her creative origins. “Maybe this captures a side of my artistry that is new for fans, but very familiar to me. A lot of this record feels like honoring my inner child. Writing songs on a guitar, dressing up as a tiny superhero. Going on an adventure.”

That sense of play, vulnerability, and emotional weight all coexist in the music itself – which Shura distills into three deceptively simple words: “gentle, big, and sad.”

The phrase holds the album’s emotional duality in sharp relief – the tenderness, the melancholy, the sense of scale and softness all at once.

Those same sentiments – the retreat inward, the quiet collapse, the impulse to turn pain into something playful – are echoed in the album’s title as well. As she explains, ‘I Got Too Sad for My Friends’ started as the name for a SoundCloud demos playlist – the songs that would later become this album – typed in a moment of brutally raw honesty.

“When I make demo playlists, I hate just calling them ‘demos’ or ‘maybe album 3’ because you just don’t know what they will become, and I didn’t want to add any pressure to myself,” Shura says. “At the time I was sad and I found myself leaning less and less on the people I loved because I sort of saw myself as an emotional burden. I was kind of just retreating… From the world. I decided to just type this out, and I enjoyed the fact that it was just a direct sentence delivered straight from my sad brain, and it also had a sense of humour to it. It is sad and it is brutal… but it’s also kind of funny?! It’s the first time I’ve had an album title before the album even exists.” The title, like the songs themselves, is intimate, unfiltered, and deeply human – a soft confession masquerading as a punchline.

That same spirit carries through the album’s music. It’s expressive and vulnerable, rich with feeling and sound alike. Highlights abound on the journey from album opener “Tokyo” to closer “Bad Kid,” each track capturing a different shade of Shura’s being – sadness, joy, reflection, release.

“Richardson,” featuring Cassandra Jenkins, stands as the album’s heartbeat – the first song Shura wrote for the project, and a crystallization of its central theme. Built on gentle guitar strums, flurries of keys, and breathtaking vocal harmonies, the track carries the weight of emotional withdrawal without ever raising its voice. “I got too down around my friends, it was slow but they stopped answering, so I stopped talking,” Shura sings, tracing the invisible drift between connection and isolation. “It’s sort of gently devastating,” Shura says, calling out that inversion of the album title as a personal highlight. “As an adult I’ve found things fall apart so slowly. You can sense it. And it’s less instantaneous but no less catastrophic. And I loved sort of capturing that. And then of course, having it return at the end of ‘Richardson,’ but never finishing the line. So it just ends with ‘So I stopped.’” That slow unraveling is rendered with aching precision, and by the song’s end, the sentence trails off mid-thought – unfinished, unresolved, as if to mirror how these breakages often go unspoken in real life, too.

Further standouts include the gut-wrenching indie pop anthem “World’s Worst Girlfriend” and the shimmering, emotionally fraught “Recognise,” both of which dig into the messiness of self-perception and longing. “I Wanna Be Loved By You” is one of the album’s most soul-soaked moments – a sparse and hopeful piano song that starts to let the light in. Shura’s voice hovers just above a hush as she sings of hurt, forgiveness, and yearning, accompanied by a loose-knit gospel choir of family, friends, and her partner. It’s intimate and unguarded, luminous and stunning:

Don’t know why I’m mad at you but I’m mad.
Wish I could forgive you but I can’t.
Tried to put the phone down on me,
Then you told me Jesus loved me.
And I guess the only thing that’s true,
I wanna be loved by you.

The final two tracks – “If You Don’t Believe in Love” (featuring Helado Negro) and “Bad Kid” (featuring Becca Mancari) – are equally entrancing. The former is meditative and glowing, offering a hushed reminder to stay present in love and time. The latter is raw and cathartic, a dreamy and lush finale confronting mortality, identity, and shame with brutal honesty and surprising levity. Both bring the record to a close not with resolution, but with acceptance – a kind of emotional, musical exhale.

It’s all temporary,
Make believe.
Like a stepping stone,
Baby where’s this river gonna flow?

So lord don’t you tell me.
Baby Please.
Where does this story go?
It’s better if we never ever know.

If you don’t believe in love,
You don’t believe in much.

Shura herself gravitates toward the album’s quieter moments – the deep cuts that may not get the spotlight, but hold the most meaning. “I often find my favourites are the deep cuts that maybe no one else cares about – shout out ‘princess leia’ from album 2,” she laughs. “So a lot of mine end up being the songs that aren’t singles. I’m really proud of ‘Leonard Street’ and can’t wait to play live. I think ‘America’ too. It’s strange because I think that when I wrote ‘America’ I had hoped or imagined a very different America in the future, and so that sort of hits and lands differently now. It’s interesting how so much time having passed changes your relationship to songs on your own record.”

An early moment on the record, “Leonard Street” feels like a final goodbye to New York, a city once filled with hope and love, now layered with absence. Over glowing textures and hushed vocals, Shura recalls the emptiness of bars, parking lots, and apartments she’ll never return to. “America,” meanwhile, takes on a broader, more disillusioned gaze – observing violence, apathy, and beauty with equal parts grief and detachment. Both songs tap into the ache of having once believed in something that no longer exists – and the strange clarity that time brings.

Where’d you go, My Dear?
Three summers and I never took the time to swim.
Where’d you go this year?
You left me with a coffee in McCarren and,
I could see inside the parking lot,
It’s empty like the bars on Leonard Street.

When I left you,
Didn’t get to.
Say goodbye to you.
We’ll be alright.

I Got Too Sad for My Friends is not a record to rush through – it’s one to sit with, to return to, to let bloom over time.

These songs ache and shimmer, whisper and unfold. They carry sorrow and humor, grit and grace. Shura doesn’t just write about feelings – she translates them into sound, making space for contradiction and clarity, stillness and movement. The result is utterly spellbinding: An album that reveals more the longer you live inside it.

As for what listeners will take from it, Shura isn’t interested in drawing the map. “What people take from something is often wildly different, and that’s part of the album’s other life. It has a rich existence with you whilst you’re making it, and then it’s in the wild and you can no control and you just have to sort of hope that it has a full and happy life,” she smiles. “It’s the closest I’ve come to having kids. So I’m just like, GO BE FREE HAVE FUN TAKE CARE I LOVE YOU! What have I taken away from it? You can do it. Even when it feels like you have no idea how.”

From not knowing whether she’d ever write another album, to making the most authentic and emotionally resonant record of her career, Shura has a lot to be proud of these days. Six years after forevher, the British songstress has returned with one of 2025’s most beautiful records – one that cuts to the core of our shared humanity with grace and gusto, vulnerability and verve. What began in silence and isolation now lives openly in the world – a tender, powerful reminder that even our quietest truths deserve to be heard.

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