Like Courtney Barnett’s “Avant Gardener,” the title track of Shura’s debut album steals a second of control during a seizure. Barnett laid out her value system in the middle of an anaphylactic shock when she remarked of a paramedic, “She thinks I'm clever because I play guitar/I think she’s clever because she stops people dying.” In “Nothing’s Real,” doctors tell Shura that her panic attack has no medical basis, and hook her up to an ECG to prove it. “I see my heartbeat inside a television screen,” she sings, niftily marking the distance between fact and feeling with an image right out of the kind of ’80s pop video her music would have once called home: “Nothing’s Real” struts and whirls like Kylie Minogue spinning around in a Devonté Hynes disco mix.
Born Aleksandra Denton to a Russian mother and British father, Shura lived in Manchester as a kid and later became a youth footballer for Manchester City. She came out, moved to London for university, and started making music, first with producer Hiatus, then former Athlete frontman and songwriter-to-the-stars Joel Pott (possibly the anti-Hynes, as instant cred goes, though a fine partner here). The panic attack came when their song “Touch,” an anxious, tender number about a romantic connection dimming, blew up on YouTube in late 2014, and major labels came knocking. (Once she had established she wasn't dying, she went with Universal.)
The result, Nothing’s Real, is a coming-of-age record documenting that period when, per Shura’s hospital experience, feelings become untrustworthy. “Maybe I knew right from the start and that’s exactly how I broke us down,” she frets on “Kidz N Stuff” (a title that also neatly outlines 20-something imaginations of adult relationships). She’s great at the acute intimacy of awkwardness: rolling a cigarette even though she gave up smoking, and wearing her cap back to front, “trying to be someone I saw on TV once.” After a major breakup, she's “one girl on the last train/Small change in the universe,” which is almost certainly the loveliest way anyone's ever described the midnight overground to Shepherds Bush. These ticks are lonely moments of action in a record overflowing with mental anguish about what to say or feel.
Nothing’s Real focuses the approach of the strong but sometimes scattershot alt-pop of the past few years (“Everything Is Embarrassing”-era Sky Ferreira, Haim’s Days Are Gone, Carly Rae Jepsen’s E•MO•TION*)* and smoothes the weirder edges of those records without lapsing into empty R&B aching. There’s a strong historical foundation here, too, evoking the softness of Janet Jackson’s Velvet Rope, and further back to the effervescent demands of Madonna’s 1983 debut. What Shura lacks in diva-ish range, she makes up in character, dressing up the odd line with enjoyably overheated phasing that plays against the nerves she’s expressing. It’s not hard to imagine Janet steaming up the windows of the excellent “2Shy,” while “What Happened to Us” has the Lindsey Buckingham urgency and “ooh! ah!” production ticks of Tango in the Night.
Even the slower songs have a kick to them. There’s a moment in “Touch” where you can hear Shura’s heart drop in her chest—“I only need you to be friends with me”—only for it to skip back into action for the fluttering chorus. Her ballads are never gloopy or pouting, retaining an endearing, incandescent naivety and propelling forward on gasps of adrenaline. That youthful optimism powers her biggest tracks, too, which, other than “Nothing’s Real,” rarely dare to broach out-and-out euphoria. Instead, there’s something understated and ecstatic to a song like “White Light,” where she's in awe of a girl who illuminates the room in a different way, and “What Happened to Us,” which channels Tunnel of Love-era Springsteen through a pastel haze.
Pott co-produced most of Nothing’s Real, with the exception of “Tongue Tied” and “What’s It Gonna Be,” a Greg Kurstin number that applies his love of perfectly cheesy synths to Shura’s addictive pep rally ultimatum for a dilly-dallying girl. The video, which upends high school movie archetypes, is set in Shermer High, the fictional institution from John Hughes’ movies, but Shura’s music is sharper and more nuanced than the rampantly nostalgic Hughes-core that proliferated five years ago. Her videos have been much more radical than rote ’80s analog graphics, too, shining a soft light on young gay couples and seekers. Along with Years & Years, Christine and the Queens, and Tegan and Sara, she’s at the vanguard of a scene of young queer pop stars who are updating the ’80s model of self-sufficient, fully liberated mainstream pop. That seemed to skip a couple of generations, or at least vanish beneath the specter of the bionic popstrels that followed in its wake. Nothing’s Real offers a fresh vision for pop’s new reality.
