This Manchester Band Isn't Rushing to Prove Itself — It's Learning to Embrace Imperfection First
Fresh off winning Glastonbury's Emerging Talent competition and riding a wave of relentless buzz, Westside Cowboy's debut album *It Goes On* chooses to slow down, turning anxiety into song instead of rushing to deliver a flawless record.
Winning the 2025 Glastonbury Emerging Talent Competition, signing to Island Records, getting picked up by Wildlife Entertainment (the same management behind Arctic Monkeys and Fontaines D.C.), and touring alongside Black Country, New Road, Blondshell, and Geese — that kind of résumé could easily become a source of pressure for any new band. Westside Cowboy's approach isn't to fight that momentum, but to write it straight into their songs.
The Manchester four-piece features Aoife Anson O'Connell on bass, Jimmy Bradbury and Reuben Haycocks on guitar, with all three trading off lead vocals, and drummer Paddy Murphy hammering out the emotion underneath. That rotating-vocalist setup sounds like four college mates still one-upping each other, yet carries a stage presence sharpened through a run of shows at The Great Escape 2025 — amateur passion paired with professional tightness is what makes this band so memorable live.
Recorded in Leeds with producer Loren Humphrey, debut album *It Goes On* drops August 21 via Adventure Recordings. Rather than overturning the direction laid out by their two previous EPs, the record feels more like a consolidation — alt-country, indie, and rockabilly continuing to ferment within what they've dubbed "Britainicana." Lead singles "Pin Up Boys" and "Kick Stones (The Boys)" are both tour-tested tracks, with the latter's forward momentum proving especially likable.
What really holds the album together is its choice of imagery. The blockbuster DVD in "Big Wheels" and the rocks that "grow hands to reach for each other" in "Coyote" are deliberately mundane images, used to contain the hard-to-articulate unease of early adulthood. As the band told NME, this new phase of life "has never really felt certain, or real," which is exactly why the album states plainly: "We are a worried age."
The album's closing track, "You Could Have Died There On The Dancefloor," lays that unease bare: "I am everything but perfect / But I'm trying." That line could stand as the whole record's thesis — not chasing a flawless polish, but letting the sound breathe naturally in the moment. In an era when everyone's expected to have themselves figured out, this kind of unpretentious honesty is exactly what a debut like this should be.
