Starting with a victory lap: Shura live in London

If it wasn’t for the stature of our surroundings, you could imagine Shura selecting these songs on the side of the stage directly from her iPod, showing us her favourite 80s and 90s selections like we’re in the opening thrushes of a house party.

Tonight’s show at KOKO is at the expense of last week’s cancelled date at The Shepherd's Bush Empire, and while the cancellation was initially bemoaned by Shura, it’s hard not to look at all this without some sense of serendipity. KOKO’s interior - from its carpeted floors to the giant disco ball above - just feels more appropriate than it’s more functional, West London counterpart. The walls feel taller, the crowd more compact; the setting feels like it will play as much of a role in the evening as the instruments in front of us.

Looking up from the lower circle, the three packed tiers of the venue tower over the stage, giving a tangible idea of the scale of Shura’s popularity in 2016. Still yet to release an album, the BBC Sound of 2015 longlist entrant has resisted the urge of all her fellow entrants and has instead focused on these longer, more focused single campaigns, allowing the likes of "Indecision", "White Light" and "Touch" float and nestle their ways into the consciousness of UK music audiences.

It has meant that despite signing a deal with Polydor, a division of Universal Music, Shura manages to straddle that kind of authenticism of a touring, independent artist - she produces and plays almost every instrument herself - alongside the widescreen dynamism and stature of one with major label backing. So we find ourselves in the strange position where tonight, even if her small handful of singles renders the notion absurd, already feels like celebratory and hard earned victory lap for the Manchester born singer.

The synth is positioned at front and centre stage, and its contribution to a large portion of tonight’s new material is much the same. "Nothing’s Real", followed shortly by "What’s It Gonna Be" are Shura at her most direct; a driving 4/4 beat and a fiercely memorable vocal. At her best, Shura can invoke powerful feelings of nostalgia; whether it’s for the by-gone eras of music that her songs obviously invoke or on a deeper level, provoking moments of reminiscing that face inwardly, as if these songs were playing in the background of some of your most cherished memories. The enormous disco ball above absolutely plays its part, but tonight you can tell these songs resonate potently and completely subjectively with everyone in the room. The same way Richard Linklater does in his movies, or David Hockney with paintings, providing these subtle signposts for audiences to locate their own individual memories and experiences, instead of trying to simply recreate them.

Previous singles are greeted with deserved adulation. The expansive, yet compelling "Indecision" is exploding with personality, aided by Shura’s boundless energy on stage as she switches from synth, to guitar, then back to synth, in what often seems like the very same bar. The soaring electro-pop ballad "2 Shy" is an emotional peak of the night, with that absolutely gorgeous chord change during the final chorus landing with such enormity that it presumably becomes structurally integral to the entire building around us.

"White Light" is the last song of the evening, with its length almost doubled when she adds an extended introduction and coda. It’s telling that Shura has chosen to release both a radio edit, as well as an extended version bookended by instrumental passages of this song (see also "Indecision"). It’s as if she is torn between her very gifted ability as a producer and musician and her sensibilities as an all out popstar. And whilst it may sound like these two qualities could only exist in opposition to each other, it’s actually the space Shura finds in between them that makes her so exciting. The virtuoso, feedback drenched instrumental coda as she finishes "White Light", or the simplistic, emotional vocal on new ballad "Make It Up" delivered delicately as the lights go down. These are the reason why you couldn’t even come close to figuring out the dominant demographic in tonight’s crowd. There is no encore tonight. We don’t need one. This has been an impeccable, career defining show, and it is surely just the beginning.