When the
British electropop singer went from viral triumph to being dropped by her label, she found fearless creativity and new love in New York
In 2014, Shura uploaded a song to SoundCloud on a whim. Refreshing her phone during breaks at her old job at a post-production company, she gawped at what she saw. The track, Touch, surged in popularity, and Shura – real name Aleksandra Denton – decided to film a video on a shoestring budget, blowing most of it on smoke bombs. The video features a procession of couples of various genders kissing in a haze of lilac. This also went viral, with views spiralling quickly into the millions. The momentum didn’t slow: she was nominated for the BBC’s Sound of … shortlist at the end of the year, and signed a record deal with Polydor.
“It was like getting undressed in front of people!” Shura says when we meet in her old hometown of Shepherd’s Bush,
London, reflecting on the pressures of making a debut album under the world’s gaze. She sips black coffee and puffs on a vape as we talk, hiding under a white
baseball cap nicked from her own merch stand. “It’s no coincidence that the first panic attack I’ve ever had in my life was during the making of my first record.” The
New York Times said the result, Nothing’s Real, approached “something like perfection”. “It was a really strange experience to go from being a nobody to a semi-somebody,” she says. Then her relationship broke down, crumbling under the strain of a relentless touring schedule. “It couldn’t handle the shift,” she shrugs.