CoSign: Westside Cowboy Just Dropped One of the Best Debut Albums in Recent Memory
CoSign is a recurring feature series from Consequence that puts a spotlight on a rising artist who has caught our eyes and ears with an exciting new release. For the latest edition, we chop it up with rising UK indie rockers Westside Cowboy, who just released their excellent debut album It Goes On.
“Sorry, we’re currently in our van, and we’ve just ran to the chippy after a gig,” Westside Cowboy’s Jimmy Bradbury says over Zoom with two fries — sorry — chips in hand. He’s indeed in the back of their tour van, sitting next to fellow bandmate Reuben Haycocks, who’s also finding life in the spoils of the post-show chippy run. They’re graciously reconnecting with me after a corrupted file erased the recording of our first chat, which featured Bradbury and drummer Paddy Murphy uncovering the secrets of the universe. “If you heard that, Aoife was just choking in the front,” they clarify as the van gets moving.
The gig they’re returning from was a “semi-acoustic” in-store performance at the Brighton record shop Resident Music, the first date of their “UK Record Store Tour” that celebrates the release of their brand new debut album, It Goes On. “We’ve never done it before, but it was really scary ’cause people were this close,” Bradbury explains. “We haven’t had that in a while. When you get to festivals and stuff, they put so many barriers in between.”
For Westside Cowboy, however, “a while” is relative. By most metrics, their path to indie rock’s buzzy ‘next up’ group has been quite swift — and deservingly so. After meeting while attending the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, the act released their debut single, the charming “I’ve Never Met Anyone I Thought I Could Really Love (Until I Met You),” in late 2024. The following year, before even the August release of their first EP, This Better Be Something Great, they earned a slot on Glastonbury’s 2025 lineup by way of winning the iconic festival’s “Emerging Talent Competition.” Even more fans, especially across the pond, then jumped on board when they opened up for Geese on the European leg of their “Getting Killed Tour” earlier this year, further adding to their momentum.
And yet, as award-winning and seemingly fully formed as their dynamic, slackery, heart-on-its-sleeve sound was upon arrival, It Goes On finds Westside Cowboy already showcasing growth. Early fan-favorites like “Drunk Sailor” established the group’s interests — energetic performances, songwriting with a focus on immediacy, killer refrains, and more sentiment than you’d expect from a band that formed partly out of love of Pavement — but the new set of tunes is easily the most consistently impressive display of their trademark “Britainicana,” the cheeky name they’ve given the push-and-pull of their American and British influences.
“Me and Reuben grew up in the middle of England, which is completely surrounded by countryside,” Bradbury says. “Which is really cool, but it’s quiet. It’s far away from a lot of big cities like London or Manchester, and when you grow up in the middle of nowhere and your neighbor’s a sheep, but all you watch are American films and TV and you get fed so much American music, you go out and try and replicate that, and it always comes off just a little bit wrong. You want to be like your American heroes when you’re a kid, but you can’t really do it because you’re from Shropshire.”
That’s not to say Westside Cowboy, despite the irony of the name, are trying to cosplay as an American-coded rock ‘n’ roll band. They’re happy to be from Britain — proud even, in a ‘we acknowledge the many systemic issues of our country’ kind of way. (I’m sure plenty of Americans can relate to that sentiment.) But, they’ve also come to recognize the unavoidable influence of their favorite Stateside predecessors. “When we did the album we were like, ‘Right, we’re gonna make it sound British,’ [but] we can’t help but making it sound a little bit American,” says Haycocks.
The “Britainicana” dichotomy manifests in several ways across the new record’s 11 songs. For one, working with producer Loren Humphrey, the band took a very specific approach to crafting the sonic palette of It Goes On, foregoing any overdrive, distortion, or fuzz pedals, a fairly uncommon move for a rock band. Instead, if the band wanted to up the intensity or play with the dynamic range, they relied on the interplay of their performances and the “clean” tones of small, cheaper amps pushed to their limits. As they tell it, there’s something strangely English about that choice, as they’ve noticed, generally speaking, that Americans are fond of big, beefy tones, while the Brits are less afraid of slightly thinner sounds and feel comfortable sitting in the mids.
For a clear example, look no further than standout single and album opener “Kick Stones (The Boys).” On the recording, the track shuffles along and builds slowly to its final crescendo. Even at its climax, though, the drive of the tune comes from the jittery performances and stark production, not a well-timed engagement of a stomp box. Early in the song’s development, however, that was less of the case. “It sounded like a Foo Fighters song,” they joke. Fearing it was too much of a rocker, the band nearly left the track on the cutting room floor before finally cracking it.
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.