Let’s get straight to the point: Westside Cowboy‘s debut album It Goes On is excellent.
Hailed by many as the best new guitar band in Britain, the four piece of Jimmy Bradbury (vocals, guitar), Reuben Haycocks (vocals, guitar), Aoife Anson O’Connell (vocals, bass) and Paddy Murphy (vocals, drums) formed in Manchester in 2023 and by 2025 they’d won Glastonbury Festival’s Emerging Talent competition. Whereas for previous winners such as R.A.E. and JayaHadADream that award may have been their peak, as they currently reside in the ‘where are they now?’ file, Westside Cowboy’s star is likely to go stratospheric with the release of It Goes On. It’s not a perfect record by any means, but it carries a confident swagger at its core which is endearing and also mightily impressive.
It’ll take the discerning listener about 26 seconds to fall in love with It Goes On. “Kick Stones (The Boys)” opens with a simplistic guitar line, shuffling drums and Haycocks’ plaintive vocal delivery. There’s a lo-fi quality to the production which feels charming rather than contrived, and lyrics that get increasingly more abstract as the song progresses. By the time O’Connell’s hesitant voice repeats the line “Have you heard that the boys / They are gone this time?” joins the throng you should be head over heels. There’s a tightness to the playing that’s reminiscent of the first Ought record (high praise indeed), and an anthemic quality as the track circles round on itself in spirals. It’s a song grounded in the subject matter of grassroots football (FC United of Manchester), and the authenticity that goes with eschewing a more glamorous and glory hunting choice of team to support (UTFT!), and that’s a core theme of the record overall – of valuing a certain ethos of lifestyle that’s genuine and uncompromised.
“Well Done Kid, You Did It” is a high point of a record full of high points. Picking a favourite song on the album is a futile exercise as you catch something new to hang onto each time you listen, but this one absolutely slaps. It’s a song about changing. It’s also a song about being content with that change. Haycocks seems to be addressing his younger self in an assuring way. “That person has gone,” he repeats as a maelstrom of noise circles around him, the band acting like a security blanket of sorts.
“Big Wheels” feels like something of a mis-step on an otherwise impeccable album. The borrowed lyrics of “Big wheels keep on turning” from “Proud Mary” and “Take the guns away from me / I can’t use them anymore” from “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” feel unnecessary rather than a pointed comment on postmodern recontextualising. It’s at the midpoint of the record and seriously impacts the momentum that was building.
The following “Pin Up Boys” rescues the situation, though, and ends with the sound of the summer – O’Connell wailing “Uh, oh uhhh” over and over and over again. If you’ve been lucky enough to see the band in recent weeks on the festival circuit you’ll know just what I mean. It’s an arresting end to a song that constantly builds through a rush of post-punk guitars and rousing lyrics – one that’s over far too soon.
O’Connell takes centre stage with her vocals on next track “Coyote”, which is fragile and fragmented. The delicately delivered opening line of “This is the most beautiful place on planet Earth” sets the tone as one of wide eyed innocence before the lyrics take a more sinister turn as the track steamrollers towards a ramshackle ending. Here’s one of the key factors that make Westside Cowboy such an alluring proposition – the lyrics and music are as one.
“Take My Leaving As I Love You” has an air of Josh T. Pearson’s masterful Last of the Country Gentlemen about it. It’s a languid prayer for a doomed love, and has an air of defeat to it that’s disheartening from such a young band and genuinely heartbreaking. The lyrics astutely build a whole world vision of those intimate moments where we’re resistant to the idea of moving on, with the line “As awful as it feels / Nothing good comes out of comfort” really hitting home in its doleful delivery. It’s a wonderful moment.
Elsewhere, “Paper Chains” is a beauty of an indie singalong without being trite or smug, while “Dobro” has an almost slacker glam feel to it. Both tracks highlight the 90s influences at the core of the record, with Grandaddy and Sparklehorse being reference points while the latter has a smattering of T-Rex thrown in for good measure.
There are lots of aural touchstones on the record, but none feel derivative. In interviews, the band have said they wanted their debut album to feel like a love letter to the bands that they grew up listening to and they’ve clearly succeeded in that aim. There’s jittery rhythms which recall early Talking Heads, lyrical obfuscation à la Pavement, a knack with choruses that feels like The Maccabees, and an overall sense of claustrophobia that brings to mind Television’s Marquee Moon.
Even the cover conjures up reference points, intentional or otherwise. A tethered horse outside some less than salubrious high rise council flats in Leeds brings to mind the allegorical chains on the horse in Andrea Arnold’s British social realist film Fish Tank or the banlieu-wandering cow from La Haine. There’s a poetic realism to the image that’s matched in the overall aesthetic of the record.
It Goes On is about as fine a record as any debut album of the last 20 years. There’s nothing overly elaborate here, and that’s exactly the point. There’s an open-hearted honesty at the core of the record, perhaps even a naivety, that’s wrapped up in concepts of identity, community and place. The album’s closing line of “Please keep me around” won’t be an issue for those about to fall in love with their new favourite band.
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