Shura Tells The Transatlantic Love Story Behind Her New Album, Forevher

By Emma Madden


Shura’s in love. The English language singer wrote an album about it, she moved to another nation because of it, and right now she’s very, quite happy to talk about it. While Interviewing 101 says to save the gossipy, “How’s your dating life?” Questions up until the end, Shura brings up her girlfriend almost immediately, without prompting. Case in point, she mentions “my girlfriend” 12 times during our hour-long conversation, both because, clearly she’s in love, yet also because we’re here to talk about her second album, forevher, which is inextricably tied to the wellspring of true love, and the person who inspired it.


Forevher, out August 16 on Secretly Canadian, comes three years immediately after Shura’s debut, Nothing’s Real, which was filled with what her fans call “heartbreak bangers.” It showcased Shura’s pop acumen, her knack for writing an euphonic hook, and her ability to convert grief of countless kinds into a shimmering, effervescent pop time capsule. With it, Shura effectively became the Pied Piper of Heartbreak.


So no one is more surprised than Shura right now that her sophomore album happens to be about successful, all-encompassing love. Although love changes things. Love radically alters perception and beautifies reality; it brings everything with each other in brilliant, poetic harmony. Right now Shura’s noticing patterns everywhere. “Wherever I go I’m followed by some sort of residence improvement,” she says to MTV News.


Twenty seconds before our call, a drill begins in the London apartment next to hers. If she moved into her girlfriend’s New York residence last November, the builders came in to do work on the residence next door. “I think it’s because I just wrote a U-Haul lesbian album,” she says. Even in conversation, Shura can twist a wonderful hook.


“There’s nothing new to mention about love, and this is effectively a love story,” she says of her new album. Although it’s not exactly a conventional one. Shura first met her girlfriend on an app called Raya, essentially a Tinder for well known people. She’d tried the latter, nevertheless fans soon spotted her between swipes. One went for now as to screenshot Shura’s Tinder and post it on Twitter, @-ing her in hopes of acknowledgement. “So I freaked and deleted it.”


Shura and the “not even famous” Raya woman spent months talking — her in Brooklyn, Shura in London — before they had the possibility to meet at a MUNA gig in New York. She recalls the anticipation she felt between texting and touching on forevher’s fourth track “The Stage,” as she sings: “Are we gonna kiss? Exhilarating / I promised you my lips in writing,” memorializing the night they met into song. No one makes a transatlantic lesbian relationship sound more appealing than Shura. “Long-distance relationships are dramatic,” she says, “and I love the drama. I’m a drama queen.”


No longer paying rent for her place in London, Shura’s since moved into an apartment with her girlfriend in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. “Honestly, I was categorize kind of worried about how it’d be whenever we moved in together,” she confesses, having gotten used to the long-distance dynamic. Yet being apart has taught the couple balance, and if she can’t visualize them staying in the U.S. Forever, she’s happy to be exactly where she is now. “I’m in love with New York because I fell in love in New York,” she says.


It’s been a welcome change, both for her life and her music. She’d been living in Shepherd’s Bush in West London with her twin brother for the past seven years, right after moving out of their dad’s residence with each other if they were 18. “We were dangerously close to becoming one of these sets of creepy twins people make documentaries about, where they live with each other their whole lives, and marry other twins.” Shura needed to be uprooted somehow.“I don’t know if that’s a product of growing up half-Russian, half-English, and not really feeling as though I fit in anywhere, that makes me wanna explore everywhere.”


Musically, also, she itches to explore every sound, taking a leaf out of Madonna’s book. “That’s a prime example of someone who is doing something new and exhilarating for every record,” she says. You won’t hear several sonic references to Madonna on forevher; those are reserved for a queer tapestry of artists, most immediately Prince. Although Shura at least pays homage to the iconoclasm of The Queen of Pop in the video for second single “religion (u can lay your hands on me).”


“My earliest memory of a music video was ‘Like A Prayer,’” she says, and she’s since come to view religion as a segment of “pop music law.” Shura’s converted herself from the Pied Piper of Heartbreak to the Vaping Lesbian Pope, because the video reveals. It also happens to be the opening song Shura wrote for the album, soon after which “religion of course seeped” itself into forevher.


“It gave me license to play around with the idea of religion as a form of devotion; devotion is closer to love, and religion is close to sex in several ways, in that it finds itself in each and every culture,” she says. Religion, specifically Christianity, is one of several classical archetypes that she obscures, or rather queers, for the sake of telling her long-distance lesbian love story.


The album’s artwork, which depicts her girlfriend haloed by blue light and leaning into the grasp of her lover, is a take on one of heterosexuality’s most enduring images of love — Auguste Rodin’s The Kiss. “Taking that iconic image and replacing it with two girls places it both inside of the eternal and the now,” she explains.


all the artwork for her singles comes washed in an identically thick shade of blue. She cites Maggie Nelson’s book Bluets, and even 2013 film Blue Is the Warmest Color as influences for that choice, along with Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky who theorized a link between the color blue and the spiritual. “The darker the blue, the more it awakens the desire for the eternal,” he once wrote. Identically, Shura suggests that “the act of loving is the desire for the eternal, and the desire for something to never end.”


So, what’s the point of falling in love once that person is eventually going to perish? “I think that’s what’s so interesting about love,” she says. “It’s certainly astonishing, although it also makes you more afraid.” Right now she finds that heightened fear each time she boards a plane, knowing that if it crashed, her lover could be left destitute. It’s a thought she mulls over on “Princess Leia,” a track that strings with each other Carrie Fisher's death and also a soldier’s death (plus her own death) — two things that happened on Shura’s flight from England to Australia.


“I’ve thought about death pretty much almost every day since I read St. Augustine’s Confessions As soon as I was 21,” she says. One paragraph in particular stood out: “There’s a little where he talks about his mother dying, and he writes about how he’s not so furious at the fact that she’s gone, yet rather that they’re no longer coexisting at the same time.”


It’s an idea inadvertently explored on “tommy,” a track entirely committed to a gentleman Shura and her girlfriend met in Austin, Texas. On it, you’ll hear him telling Shura about his dead partner, how she came to him in a dream once and said: “It’s fine, please fall in love again.” “I think that’s one of the weirdest things about life,” Shura says on reflection, “We don’t pick to live, we just happen to exist, and by virtue of existing, one must die.”


“But anyway,” she says, “I don’t think I’ve answered your question about how to reconcile love with death.” Not that she needs to. Forevher does it for her.