REVIEW: Westside Cowboy - It Goes On

There’s something wonderfully stubborn about WESTSIDE COWBOY. In an era when young guitar bands can feel engineered for immediacy - polished, packaged and desperate to be the next big thing - the Manchester four-piece have built their reputation on the exact opposite: scrappy guitars, instinctive songwriting, gang vocals and the kind of chemistry that sounds less like a carefully assembled band and more like four mates discovering what happens when they plug everything in and turn it up. It Goes On, their debut album for Island Records, is the payoff.

Across eleven tracks and a lean 35-and-a-half minutes, WESTSIDE COWBOY take their self-appointed “Britainicana” tag and stretch it far beyond its novelty value. Americana, folk, post-punk, classic indie and scuzzy guitar rock are thrown into the same battered old van, somehow all fitting comfortably together. The result is an album that feels simultaneously familiar and completely alive. The crucial thing is that It Goes On never sounds like a band trying to prove they belong in the room.

Opener Kick Stones (The Boys) immediately establishes the album’s communal, live-wire spirit. Built around a propulsive rhythm inspired by THE VELVET UNDERGROUND’s What Goes On, it has the looseness of a rehearsal-room favourite but the hooks of something destined for much larger rooms. There’s a sense of movement throughout - guitars churning, vocals colliding, the rhythm section refusing to sit still - but underneath the noise is an enormous amount of warmth. That warmth is what separates WESTSIDE COWBOY from a lot of their contemporaries. Paper Chains and Dobro push further into their warped take on indie rock, the latter carrying the kind of scruffy, STROKES-adjacent swagger that could easily become irritating in lesser hands. Instead, WESTSIDE COWBOY give it personality. They sound like they understand the history of guitar music without becoming trapped by it.

And then comes Well Done Kid, You Did It, one of the record’s most affecting moments. The album repeatedly circles around the uncertainty of being young and attempting to make sense of a world that seems increasingly difficult to navigate, but there’s very little self-pity here. Instead, the band find something uplifting in simply continuing. That emotional directness is central to It Goes On: the lyrics may leave room for interpretation, but the feeling rarely does. Worried Age takes that anxiety and turns it into momentum. Its title could easily belong to a miserable post-punk record, but WESTSIDE COWBOY aren’t interested in wallowing. The track steadily expands until the tension finally gives way to something approaching release. It is music for being worried together rather than being worried alone - an important distinction for a band whose entire identity seems rooted in community.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRI0tuDiyy4

Big Wheels offers another side of the band, its bittersweet vocal melodies and loose-limbed charm providing one of the album’s most immediately loveable moments. Then Pin Up Boys arrives like someone has kicked the door off its hinges. Already a live favourite, the track reportedly became increasingly “heavier and more aggro” each time the band played it. That evolution is audible. What begins sparsely soon erupts into a wonderfully ragged collision of guitars and drums before eventually pulling itself back from the brink. It is the clearest demonstration of the band’s ability to take a classic quiet-loud dynamic and make it feel genuinely physical rather than merely nostalgic.

If there is a criticism to level at It Goes On, it is that the album’s aesthetic is so deliberately loose that some of its edges occasionally blur together. WESTSIDE COWBOY clearly favour instinct over immaculate precision, and while that gives the record its personality, it can occasionally make individual moments feel less distinct than they deserve.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdx0uQR_Sro

But then Coyote and Patchwork arrive to pull the album in different directions, before Take My Leaving As I Love You strips everything back. It is perhaps the album’s most important song. After nearly half an hour of guitars, harmonies and forward momentum, Reuben Haycocks is left with little more than an acoustic guitar. The resulting intimacy feels enormous. At live performances, Aoife Anson O’Connell’s haunting vocals have added an almost folk-traditional quality to the song, and on record the space around Haycocks’ voice becomes as important as the notes themselves. Then, rather than ending in melancholy, WESTSIDE COWBOY save their biggest statement for last.

You Could Have Died There On The Dancefloor is exactly the sort of finale this album needs: wide-eyed, hopeful and slightly battered around the edges. Its philosophy is wonderfully simple - nobody has to be perfect; trying is enough. The band deliberately chose it as the final track, and it lands like the closing scene of a coming-of-age film where nobody has quite figured everything out, but everyone has decided to keep moving.

That is ultimately what makes It Goes On so compelling.

For all the talk of guitar music being back, there is very little sense here that WESTSIDE COWBOY are attempting to revive anything. They are taking the pieces they love - the jangling indie guitar, the American folk influence, the Velvet Underground chug, the scrappiness of post-punk and the communal release of a great live band - and making them their own. The hype surrounding WESTSIDE COWBOY has been enormous. They have already graduated from tiny rooms to festival stages and major headline dates before even releasing their debut, with the likes of The Guardian, NME, Dazed and Rolling Stone UK all piling praise onto the band. But It Goes On is where the conversation needs to change. This isn’t simply an album from an exciting young band. It is an album from a band that already understands exactly why people fall in love with bands in the first place. And, as the title promises, they keep going.

Score: 9/10 

It Goes On will be released on 21st August 2026 via Island Records.

Words: Angel Turley

Photos: Clementine Schneidermann