It doesn't happen often, but there are insomniac moments where I find myself trying to lull myself back to sleep by imagining all the things I could've done better -- relationships I fucked up, relationships I was too chickenshit to start, relationships I never even paused to consider as possibilities because I can't process things as they happen. I'm happy with where I ended up in life, so I don't dwell on it too often, but it's always there: that impulse to deconstruct my own past, to figure out what I did wrong. I imagine that's what Shura spends a lot of her time doing. Shura is a pop star, or at least a prospective pop star. She sings bright, pretty, immediately engaging songs over intricately arranged synthetic tracks, and you can almost sense the UK starmaking machinery rumbling to life, trying to turn her into something. But there's no escapism in Nothing's Real, Shura's debut album, which has been a couple of years in the making. It's not a statement of intent. It's a long, tortured rumination, a picking-apart of a young person's past. It's an album full of warm and assured and deeply pretty music, but there's something so sad about all of it.