Oversize are fusing shoegaze and emo to expel their grief

In 2025, everyone is once again staring at their shoes. Gen Z love Slowdive. My Bloody Valentine are playing live for the first time in seven years. The door’s been flung wide open for newer artists with chunky pedalboards to deliver their own takes on swirling, dreamy soundscapes – often, they rub shoulders with the hardcore world, and other times with metal or emo.

Sometimes, the shoegaze resurgence seems like it’s crowded with American bands. Salisbury quartet Oversize are hoping to refocus attention on the atmospheric sounds from the UK with their debut album, ‘Vital Signs’. “I think it has become more of an Americanised genre over the last couple of years, but the bands that originally inspired us were all English or Irish,” says guitarist Lewis Lennane-Emm.

“I don’t have a chip on my shoulder, but as an area of the world, we have such a rich history of shoegaze and alternative guitar music and it does feel like it’s been forgotten a bit,” he continues. “I almost see it as a personal venture of mine to bring some of that UK charm within that sort of music over here.”

“You’re the mayor of the Society of British Shoegaze Preservation,” jokes his bandmate Sam McCauley.

“Pop that in big quotes!” Lennane-Emm laughs, before making a more serious point. “I think there’s something about this rainy, unpleasant land that provides really good guitar music.”

“If there’s anything to be gained from grieving, it certainly makes you a stronger person. It gives you a different perspective, a different way of seeing things” – Sam McCauley

Not as much of it, however, comes out of their sleepy, rural town of Salisbury. Once, it had a rich, self-sufficient scene which brought them together when they were teenagers. There were shows on every weekend, space to rehearse and create at the local community centre Grosvenor House. “It’s so rural and public transport is so awful that you had to make your own scene,” Lennane-Emm recalls. But post-pandemic, that scene has been decimated: “We walk past that building – it got defunded and boarded up and now it’s rotten on the inside. It’s such a shame, the amount of kids who could have stayed out of trouble if they’d only had somewhere to go and had a creative outlet.”

The band that came to be Oversize began taking shape in 2017 after Lennane-Emm returned to Salisbury – “one of those places people tend to leave and then later come back to” – upon finishing university. Knowing that McCauley was about, he sent him some demos in the hope of working with him, having already admired his work in other projects. McCauley brought on board drummer Sam Shutler – affectionately known as Big Sam to differentiate him from McCauley – and together they started fleshing out those demos, dragging one-watt amps to McCauley’s loft after work to write.

This was mostly casual music-making dependent on whether the trio’s calendars lined up; sometimes the three of them would go months without seeing each other. In late 2019, however, they moulded themselves into a more serious group of musicians, completed by guitarist Tazz Edwards and bassist George Lewis, from which point they took the name Oversize. After their first couple of shows, however, the pandemic hit.

While that might have put the brakes on their hopes to play live, it bought them time to write – and for the ‘90s rock comforting them through lockdowns time to bleed into and sculpt their sound. “It gave us a lot of time to understand what sounds we wanted to make as a band,” McCauley shares. By the time live music came back, they’d recorded two EPs, 2021’s ‘In Balance’ and 2022’s ‘Into The Ceiling’. Nonetheless, these releases and their eventual debut demanded that they put their full selves – and their wallets – into it, as Lennane-Emm recalls: “We self-funded this and had to bet on ourselves. We all saved up money and took out loans so we could go into the studio and crack out the album in 12 days.”

They may not have had an eye to making their debut album at this point, but its emotional arc harks back to that time. In September 2021, McCauley’s mum died from Covid-19, spending the last couple of months of her life in hospital. It was the first time he had experienced loss, an experience made all the more agonising by not being able to visit or communicate with her. As such, his grieving began while she was still around. Everything he felt was poured into music. “There’s something to be said about the power of healing yourself through music for sure,” he acknowledges.

‘Vital Signs’ makes no attempt to dress up the experience of grieving as something insightful and profound. It faithfully presents it in striking yet emotionally neutral terms, neither positive nor negative. “We anticipate your heart will break in two/The space between ourselves is wider than this room,” McCauley sings on early single ‘Fall Apart’, while on ‘Daretomove’, he unsparingly mentions accepting “the love we’re born to lose”. If death is a fact of life, then by extension, grief is too; it morphs over time, yet remains a constant.

“There’s something to be said about the power of healing yourself through music for sure” – Sam McCauley

“It is what it is, right?” McCauley suggests. “It’s so complex and there are so many emotions within grief. It was just about painting the journey that I was on. If there’s anything to be gained from grieving, it certainly makes you a stronger person. It gives you a different perspective, a different way of seeing things. That was something I really wanted to get across, to people who resonate with it and can find some form of healing in it. I didn’t set out to make a record for grievers – you could be grieving the loss of the change that fell out of your pocket.”

McCauley opens the floodgates on his emotions against an oceanic, expansive backdrop, picking up on the feeling he’s getting from the music his bandmates offer him. He’s transmuting that feeling outwards, hoping those in the crowd might find solace, or at least that they feel something too. For them, ultimately, music is their means of connection.

Oversize’s debut album ‘Vital Signs’ is out now on SharpTone

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