WESTSIDE COWBOY - It Goes On

Questions about the future of Westside Cowboy date back to just a few months ago, when the release of the EP “So Much Country 'Till We Get There” suggested their debut long player was getting closer and closer. “It Goes On” is deliberately presented by the Manchester band as imperfect and unfussy, something meant simply to remind its members why they fell in love with music in the first place (and indeed there are plenty of musical easter eggs, all well placed). It's also a fairly faithful snapshot of young adults currently living through that period right after the so-called coming of age, where doubts and worries of every kind call the shots.

Loren Humphrey (Cameron Winter, Wunderhorse, Automatic) is back on production duties, continuing to work around that style dubbed “Britainicana”, which accounts for a good deal of the hype that has surrounded the project for a while now. Country and folk details are still present, but the foundation is mainly indie-rock with art-rock elements.
The opener kicks in with the dizzying crescendo of standout track “Kick Stones (The Boys)”, keeping up the tight pace on the following “Paperchains”, whose refrain gives the album its title. “Dobro” features a blatant tribute to the guitar of T. Rex's “Get It On”, while personal growth and the changes that come with it are the central themes of “Well Done Kid, You Did It”.

We are a worried age
Where your panic feels more real than a thought
And the vivid dreams of a careless death
And it eats, and it sleeps, and it walks

Lyrically, one of the strongest songs is undoubtedly “Worried Age”. This writer found a spontaneous comparison with Wolf Alice's “Space & Time”, which might seem an odd pairing to most, but which effectively contrasts Gen Z's perception of fears about the future (Westside Cowboy are in their mid-twenties, so about a decade separates them from the members of the London band fronted by Ellie Rowsell) with that of Millennials. There's an important conceptual difference between the two songs: while the track sung by Rowsell loudly demanded degrees of freedom in order to heal and come to terms with change, despite the fear of the future, here instead there's a quietly bitter kind of awareness, where panic is a sentient entity rather than just a thought or feeling, and all that's left is an emotional stalemate with no way out.

With the loose-limbed “Big Wheels” thoughts turn to Bob Dylan, followed by the prominent drumming on “Pin Up Boys”, where a more pronounced nineties power pop streak emerges, and the frantic country-folk of “Coyote”, on which bassist Aoife Anson O'Connell takes the lead vocal. The initially cautious build and final explosion of “Patchwork” bring caroline to mind, before giving way to the Dylan-esque “Take My Leaving As I Love You”, a brief, stripped-back episode of acoustic guitar and voice, perhaps a touch less effective than the rest of the batch.

The open-ended closer “You Could Have Died There On The Dancefloor” works as a possible cynical answer to Arctic Monkeys' “I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor”. The dancefloor is no longer the electrifying place described by Alex Turner, but a suffocating, alienating one, where the gazes of everyone present are caught like moths by the bluish light emitted by smartphone screens. A youth quite different from the hedonistic provincial English weekends recounted by “Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not” exactly twenty years ago. Although one might have expected something even more ambitious on the instrumental front after their earlier short releases, Westside Cowboy's “It Goes On” doesn't disappoint at all, and its key strength remains the almost startling honesty, especially lyrically, that the quartet proudly puts on display.

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26/08/2026