It Goes On is the debut album from the alt-folk indie band Westside Cowboy — having had a meteoric rise since releasing their first single, ‘I’ve Never Met Anyone I Thought I Could Really Love (Until I Met You)’ in 2024 — and in drip-feeding new material through live performances with Geese, Blondshell and others in previous years, well-deserved hype has exploded. With an eclectic mix of influences ranging from The Velvet Underground to the earlier works of The Strokes, It Goes On is a celebratory mashup of what makes Westside Cowboy so unique, and their first full-length album marks a long-awaited return to form for the Manchester quartet.
The album’s opening track, ‘Kick Stones (The Boys)’, eases in with a slow build-up of instruments and vocals before really taking off with the scrappy, energy-filled tone of ‘Paperchains’ and the band’s self-proclaimed strut song ‘Dobro’. However, this doesn’t take away from the raw emotional core that defined their early catalogue, with lyrics from ‘Dobro’, in particular, repeatedly yearning alongside the sound of drowning guitar “If you care / Please come home.”
This frantic pace of songs only speeds up, spanning multiple genres from 90s slacker rock in ‘Big Wheels’ before crescendoing with the closing sentiments of 70s rock inspired ‘Pin Up Boys’. My personal favourite, ‘Coyote’ next brings this pace to a halt, with a slow, stripped-back opening which only builds to create a competition between O’Connell’s and Haycock’s vocals as well as the frantic clatter of instruments that accompanies them.
‘Take My Leaving As I Love You’ is an almost perfect closer, a gut-wrenching acoustic ballad. However, it isn’t their final track, and that is what is at the heart of Westside Cowboy — there is always more in the tank. Whenever you think they’re over, there is always something more to add to the track. Whether that is the discordant strums of Reuben Haycock’s guitar on ‘Patchwork’ or Aoife Anson-O’Connell’s whimsical warbling on ‘Pin Up Boys’, or in this case ‘You Could’ve Died There On The Dancefloor’. Opening with the sharp, jolting sound of Murphy’s drums perfectly contrasts the preceding song, and ending with a simple “That’s all” rounds out the album to perfectly encapsulate the raw emotion of adolescence and the worry of coming of age.
Porplemuncher, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
