The Mancunian four-piece’s eleven-track debut balances wild, care-free sonic experimentation with a youthful anxiety for the future – a landmark record to define the ‘Britainicana’ genre.
By Jack Oatway
At the turn of the 20th-century, freight trains arrived down the middle of Manhattan’s Tenth Avenue, often crushing hapless pedestrians beneath the big wheels of industrialisation. To reduce the casualties, a trade of horse-riding signalmen emerged: West Side cowboys. They rode patiently out front of the locomotives, waving warning flags and lanterns, steering foot traffic for the unaccustomed populous. As the 21st-century dawned, the story of these riders who straddled two eras (horse and rail), and who heralded the unforeseen dangers of the rapid industrialisation defining their century, inspired the name behind a band of four final-year uni students in Manchester: Westside Cowboy.
I got my first taste of their infectious stage energy at their headline gig at Hebden Bridge’s famous Trades Club last year. Since then the Mancunian four-piece struck gold, winning an opportunity to play live at Glastonbury through the 2025 Emerging Talent Competition. With two EPs under their belts, alongside tours with Black Country, New Road and Geese, Westside Cowboy’s debut album It Goes On straddles two eras for the band itself, written in the maelstrom of ‘making it big’ and playing on some of the biggest stages around.
Despite this anxious whirlwind, the eleven-track record acts as a cathartic release, with battle-tested material emblematic of the band’s origins and central ethos: to create and play lively music without caginess or over-complication, generous in its invitation of disparate genres – what they call ‘Britainicana’. The band excitedly leans into this do-it-yourself experimentation of skiffle (a blend of folk, blues, and country performed with homemade instruments that took off in the UK around the 1950s), allowing layered vocals and textures of ‘traditional’ folk to flavour their fast-paced, driving guitar music in a wholly original manner.
From the first track and throughout the LP, the brazen hiss of tape places the record in another sonic era. The decision to record on tape at Greenmount Studio, a studio just outside of Leeds I have also had the pleasure of recording in with Rob Slater (sound wizard and generally lovely guy whose band, Carpet, supported Westside Cowboy at Hebden Bridge), suits both the skiffle influence and the care-free teenage slacker rock guitar work that Jimmy Bradbury and Reuben Haycocks layer hypnotically track after track.
Kick Stones (The Boys), one of the album’s singles, leads the freight train at a galloping pace that will follow right up until the record’s penultimate number. The drums, played by part-man, part-beast Paddy Murphy, have a hounding, infectious restlessness. What works so well about Paddy’s drumming on the LP is his ability to carry four-on-the-floor rhythms with a unique sense of urgency, mixing in canted chops and derailing into messy breakdowns without ever losing sense of direction. The next track, Paper Chains, doesn’t spare the spurs either, making the ungainly cadence of its 14/4 signature effortlessly danceable. It’s in these two tracks that another piece of Westside Cowboy’s DNA reveals itself: the immense fondness for twiddly harmonics, slides, and pitch bends that accent the jangly, scratchy, yet consistent guitar work.
The title of the next track, Dobro, referring to a type of resonator guitar commonly used in bluegrass music, is a personal favourite of mine, reining in the pace from the previous two tracks and setting up some of the most satisfying chord changes of the record. The credit lies with Aoife Anson O’Connell’s comforting bassline, as it often does across It Goes On, and how it regulates the runaway energy and twiddly experimentation of the rest of the band, providing a warm bed of root notes that the twin guitars and vocal harmonies rely upon for any of these songs to function. That’s not to say her playing lacks experimentation either, with cantering rhythms and passing phrases across the later verse of Dobro serving a crucial counterpoint once the guitars take their turn to hold down the chords.
Big Wheels is another standout track from the LP; the band leans into the lower fidelity sound and a much more reserved tempo almost to a Duster-inspired, slow-core effect. Here Aoife’s bass opens, introducing a dissonant note intentionally clashing with the relaxed drums and guitars to weave in the subtle anxious texture that exists across all of It Goes On. The vocal chain tends towards the highly saturated end of production, à la The Strokes, with the song’s lyricism angled in a direction that the album only at times points to: the mixture of personal regrets, hopes, and changes in your life measured up against the seemingly insurmountable scale of global challenges. The lyrics speak on lost love and memories of blockbuster DVDs, then pivot to the big wheels (Of life? Of fortune? Of industry?) that turn on and on. The refrain changes later in the song, providing more clarity on the kind of big wheels we’re talking about: “The steam drill keeps on pounding to the ground.”
Big Wheels is not the only track to touch on the troubling state of the world, with Coyote explicitly calling out politicians that destroy nature in favour of industry, a topic on the forefront with talks of further fossil fuel deals selling UK resources away to big oil, with the rise of energy-demanding AI data centres, and the recent record droughts that have startled the nation. It’s understandable to feel frightened and helpless, and these songs are a reflection of the young person’s perspective to these issues that will not go away unless something is done to change them. In this way, the title of the album takes on multiple meanings. Industry goes on, affronts to the environment and society go on every day. But our lives will go on, and the resistance against those forces will go on too.
Like the West Side cowboys of old, the band Westside Cowboy heralds the dangers of the next wave of industrialisation seeking to again change the paradigm of this century, whose big fast wheels will crush who knows how many lives. It is this blend of care-free sonic experimentation with youthful anxiety for the future that defines the sound of It Goes On, laying a groundwork that Westside Cowboy will no doubt build upon as their natural curiosity for all kinds of music and their compassion for all kinds of people propel them forward.
It Goes On is due to be released 21 August 2026; it’s available to pre-order here.