Westside Cowboy – It Goes On – soundsfromthedarkside

If this is how it goes on, we’re listening.

Can we ever have enough youngster indie bands? Probably not. They remain one of the driving forces keeping music human: friends picking up instruments, learning how to play together, figuring out their own sound and, somewhere along the way, becoming connected through the simple act of making noise in a room. Plenty of these bands have talent. Only a few get lucky. Westside Cowboy are one of those few.

Formed in Manchester, Westside Cowboy quickly became part of the famous Windmill scene, supported established bands such as Black Midi, Black Country, New Road and Geese early on and also won the 2025 Glastonbury Emerging Talent award. This all happened in the first three years since their formation and rocketed them to their debut album, It Goes On, which without doubt is fresh, warm and wonderfully human. But it is not without some of the imperfections that come with a first outing.

Westside Cowboy waste little time. Most songs don’t pass the three-minute mark and thus keep the record moving accordingly. Opener Kick Stones (The Boys) starts cautiously but opens up after Aoife Anson O’Connell’s second voice enters. Guitars drive the song forward, but above all it feels positive. Paperchains carries that feeling further. With it’s harmony, melody and rock feel it’s the kind of song that makes you want to go outside, face whatever is coming and see where you end up. Westside Cowboy themselves call their music a mixture of British indie and American roots or “Britainicana”, and here that term starts to make sense. On Dobro, the pace drops, which feels like a smart move after the energetic opening. Just before things threaten to get dull the harmonies between Reuben Haycocks and O’Connell pull the song back in. In doing so, they also stop It Goes On from becoming just another youthful guitar banger and introduce the record’s more reflective side.

From here the mood gradually becomes more melancholic without ever drowning in misery. Well Done Kid, You Did It and especially Worried Age bring the album’s central coming-of-age theme to the foreground. Here Haycocks and O’Connell sing: “We are a worried age. Where your panic feels more real than a thought” At the centre of the record the band shows its young heart and asks how you can keep up in a world that changes so fast. With Pin Up Boys some of the energy from the opening stretch comes back. It is one of the album’s most immediate songs.

Yet by this point another characteristic also becomes impossible to ignore: the band repeatedly uses the same dynamic construction. Songs begin quietly or vulnerably, then somewhere around a third or halfway through the rhythm section kicks in and everything expands. It works. Often very well. But it also becomes predictable. For all its freshness, the album operates within a surprisingly narrow musical framework. There are few outright rock songs and hardly any true ballads. Memorable standalone guitar melodies are relatively scarce too as the guitars function more as texture and propulsion. Take My Leaving As I Love You is the only true ballad on the album. It gives Haycocks’ voice all the space he needs to emphasise loving someone also means knowing when to let go: “As awful as it feels. Nothing good comes out of comfort”.

It Goes On sounds unmistakably like a debut, and that is both its charm and its limitation. Westside Cowboy already have something harder to manufacture than technical perfection: chemistry. Their main message seems to be that life goes on, time goes on and problems go on, but so do we. The next step will be finding out who each of them becomes within this collective. For now, though, it is on and let them enjoy the ride.

Label: Island Records, 2026

Buy it here: https://shop.islandrecords.co.uk/collections/westside-cowboy

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