- Island
- 2026
You need a particular kind of brilliance to take sounds and elements the ideas that we have heard a million times and to make those things feel visceral and exciting and new. Westside Cowboy, a very new band from Manchester, have figured it out. On their full-length debut It Goes On, they keep going back to the same wells as countless indie rockers before them — drawling monotone voices, intricate tangles of guitars, non sequitur lyrics that verge on abstraction, passionately wailed backup harmonies. You can pick out little pieces and diagram exactly which influences they're cribbing. But Westside Cowboy attack those sounds with such explosive, headlong joy that those kinds of rock-critic games just stop mattering. When they truly achieve liftoff, which they do a lot on this album, you have to stop thinking of them as a reflection of the past and more as the future. They're inspired by many, many bands, sure. But way more importantly, they're inspiring.
Westside Cowboy understand the build. Consider the single "Pin Up Boys," one of the best straight-up guitar-rock tunes I've heard in the past year or so. It opens with Reuben Haycocks muttering over clanging, buzzing guitar chimes. His lyrics aren't specific enough to reveal themselves — "If nothing else, at least I looked alive/ I was standing to attention by the time that you arrived" — but they mean something to him, and something plaintively painful creeps into his delivery. Then the hammer drops, and the rest of the band comes crashing in. They're fuzzy and hard and angular, and they push Haycocks' voice into more of a teeth-gritted snarl. When they hit the chorus, the drums sounds like boulders rolling down mountains, and the whole band sings behind Haycocks, transforming him from an insular weirdo to the leader of an anarchic mob. Then they get bigger, to the point where they're all howling together and every wild drum fill and guitar-scratch feels like a firework going off in your brain. I have no idea what the song is about, but I know what it does to me.
How does that happen? How is there this much feverish life in what these kids are doing? Westside Cowboy aren't necessarily trying to push indie rock forward, but there's an adrenalized all-out intensity to everything on It Goes On. The record's sound is fully steeped in the '90s indie rock that came into existence before any of the members of Westside Cowboy were born. Earlier this year, Haycocks told The Big Takeover that he learned about Pavement and Wilco and Teenage Fanclub from his parents. But even when the record directly quotes from past generations' touchstones, It Goes On never feels like pastiche. It's so much more alive than that.
Westside Cowboy have only been a band for about three years. They met when they were studying at a Manchester conservatory together, and some of them only just graduated last year. A few of them played together in different configurations before forming this band. At first, Westside Cowboy was an excuse to hang out and play folk and skiffle covers together, and they kept that simplicity and engagement when they started writing originals. As a band, they make a point of doing everything organically, not adding any elements that they wouldn't be able to play live. Haycocks seems to be the de facto bandleader, but all four members sing lead sometimes. Maybe that one-for-all setup is the reason that they've managed to tap into such a giddy, reckless sense of energy, or maybe it's something mysterious, something that can only be witnessed and not understood.
It's time to say the word now: Geese. I wasn't going to get out of this review without bringing them up. Wouldn't be possible. Westside Cowboy have opened shows for Geese before. They recorded It Goes On with Loren Humphry, a producer who has worked with Geese and with solo Cameron Winter. Reuben Haycocks doesn't have Winter's operatic wail, but his frazzled deadpan has a similar quality, and the two bands have a similar way with frenzied, angular guitar-squalls. Both Geese and Westside Cowboy sometimes sound like they're racing, trying to scratch out their skronky fizz-roars before inspiration fades. For all those similarities, though, it's impossible to get the two bands confused. In place of Geese's oblique glamor, Westside Cowboy have a starry-eyed melodic simplicity, something that they claim to have picked up from traditional folk music. It's downright wholesome.
It Goes On follows a couple of hugely promising EPs and makes good on all the potential that those records showed. There are so many moments on this album that absolutely sweep me away — the storm of drums and overlapping voices on "Well Done Kid, You Did It," the freewheeling surf-guitar leads on "Coyote," the part where "Paper Chains" falls to pieces, ends, and then suddenly starts up again. Westside Cowboy aren't shy about quoting the greats. Their "Big Wheels" lyrics paraphrase both Bob Dylan and Creedence Clearwater Revival, while Aoife Anson-O’Connell's halting vocal on "Coyote" directly evokes the Velvet Underground songs where Maureen Tucker would sing lead. But those gestures are never overly reverent or cute. Instead, they only help reveal this band's rare ability to build exciting new structures out of those old building blocks.
We just don't get debut albums like this very often. I hear confidence in Westside Cowboy's anxiety and anxiety in their confidence. Almost every song builds into a roaring tower of joyous noise. Almost every song has at least one moment of delicate, heart-stopping beauty. Despite their inventive instrumental interplay, the sharpness of their hooks, and the general buzz-band vibe that they give off, Westside Cowboy sound like kids who are still excited to learn what kinds of noises they can all make together. They might've built their sound out of familiar ingredients, but it's all new to them. And when that sounds lifts you up and carries you away, it might feel new to you, too.
It Goes On is out 8/21 on Island.
Other albums of note out this week:
• Wild Pink's Still Coming Down
• Denzel Curry & Kenneth Blume's ii
• Weezer's Weezer (The Gold Album)
• Brennan Wedl's Brennan Wedl
• Chelsea Wolfe's The Dark
• Sondre Lerche's Acrobats
• The Afghan Whigs' Soft Control
• Julia Holter's Materia
• Jorja Smith's What Are The Odds
• Brandon Flowers' Thrasher
• Lambchop's Punching The Clown
• Squirrel Flower's Say A Prayer To The Gods Of Getting Going
• Cornelius' Refractions
• Lusine's Melting Days
• Tyondai Braxton's Splayed Werks
• Stephen O’Malley's Avaeken
• Cleo Sol's Gentlewoman
• DMA's' DMA's
• Black Marble's Life In Small Spaces
• Sam Smith's Hazel Eyes
• Skilla Baby's The Price Of Fame
• Natalie Merchant’s Cabinet Of Wonder
• William Shatner's Love & Other Mysteries
• Sir Anthony Hopkins' Life Is A Dream
• Grace Potter's Trespasser
• Keb’ Mo’'s The Breakdown
• Guiding Light's Fear On My Own Time
• Elanor Moss' The Knife, The Needle
• Loren Connors, Elliott Sharp, & Michael Vallera's When The Moon Is New
• GB's Herzsprung
• Rob Moose & Thomas Powers’ Put Wind In My Sails
• Mary Beth Barone's Galaxy Brain
• Francesca Gaza's Crown Shyness
• Frances Chang's been thinking bout confession
• Oh Louise's Everything On High
• Stoic's PAELLA!
• Ray Wylie Hubbard’s Reel 2 Reel 4 Real
• Steve Hackman's Sacred Math
• Improvement Movement's Your Perfect Real Life
• Lexi Jayde's LOVER GIRL
• Destin Conrad's Roadrunner
• James Eichman's St. Catherine Street
• Shimonaka's Shimonaka
• Lorg's I Fell For Fantasy
• Jack Larkin's Purkinje Shift
• My Pet Fossil's Live My Valley Life
• Anna Graves' America’s Greatest Burnout
• Ruth B.'s Peace To Make
• I Will Die In This Jean Jacket's Hang From A Cloud
• Joyous Wolf's In Between
• Sweet Gloom's No Love Lost
• Antony Szmierek's Decoding Birdsong
• RIBS' COLD RIBS
• The Barbarians Of California's MEGATONS
• Paul Spring's Barnstorm
• Ok Cowgirl's Rhinestone Cowgirl
• Mark Ciani's Utopia
• Ocean Sleeper's Peace When I’m Dead
• Sawyer Hill's Everybody’s Home, Nobody’s Happy
• New Age Healers' Blowing Smoke Through the Choir
• French Film's Yours + Five
• James Ivy's The Seams
• Bombargo's Love, In Spite Of Everything
• Only Fire's Hoe Weekend
• Ghost Hounds' Justified
• Siavash Amini & Eugene Thacker's Songs For Sad Poets, Vol. III
• Dana Salah's Bent Bladna
• Echoes Of…'s Last Days
• Mark Chadwick's Ouse Dragon
• Ernest Strawfield's Untitled
• Fatt Smaxk's Banks House
• AXTY's The Pain Made Me Who I Am
• Plum's Bodies In Motion
• Steven Price's Coyote vs. Acme soundtrack
• Stella Lefty's Long Way Home
• Cruz Beckham's Wear & Tear
• Paris Jackson's HAPPIEST DAY OF MY LIFE
• The Cramps' Gravest Gravy
• Happy Mondays' Pills 'n' Thrills And Bellyaches (Super Deluxe Edition)
• The Verve Records: The Sound Of America box set
• Maribou State's Hallucinating Love (Deluxe)
• Double Wish's Double Wish Remixes
• ENHYPEN's THE SIN : BLISS mini album
• No Joy & Fire-Toolz's Big Life, Big Leaf EP
• Um, Jennifer?'s Dirty Twice EP
• Wolf Alice's The Clearing (B Sides) EP
• Lutto Lento's 2569 EP
• Kojo Funds' Hello It's Me Again EP
• The Secret Plan's Word Weapons EP
• Foglights' Nous Deux EP
• Brandon Wisham's Ain’t What It Looks Like EP
• Spaer's Lessons And Nonsense EP
• Nolan Taylor's 1:17AM EP
• Lilyisthatyou's FROM THE GARDEN I GREW EP
