Shura

A self-taught producer with a reflective approach to songwriting, Shura lends a light yet wistful quality to the wave of 1980s and 1990s pop and R&B that resurfaced in the late 2010s. Her hazy, nostalgic approach first surfaced on the 2016 album Nothing's Real before gaining added depth and drive on 2019's Forevher.

Born to an English documentary filmmaker and a Russian actress, she picked up music at 13 after her father showed her basic guitar chords; her brother's work as a DJ later prompted her to capture her own material on the family's mini-disc recorder at 16. While attending University College London she joined a band and linked up with producer Hiatus, whose 2011 remix of "River" led to further collaborations that surfaced on his 2013 album Parklands.

Following a year away in the Amazon rainforest, Shura learned music-production software through online tutorials during night shifts as a video editor. Teaming with co-producer Joel Pott, formerly of Athlete, she issued her debut single "Touch" in February 2014. The kindred follow-up "Just Once" appeared that July, and the energetic dance-pop track "Indecision" followed in October. Late that year she earned a longlisting for the BBC Sound of 2015 poll. Her first official release, the White Light EP, came out in July 2015; she also featured on Mura Masa's "Love for That" that year. Nothing's Real arrived as her debut full-length in July 2016.

By 2018 she had returned to the studio alongside Pott, Tourist, and Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs and contributed to Tracey Thorn's album Record. In February 2019 Shura appeared on Tourist's Everyday. Drawing from a long-distance relationship as well as the work of Joni Mitchell and Minnie Riperton, she delivered her second album Forevher on Secretly Canadian that August.