Westside Cowboy, the Manchester band, release debut album "It Goes On"

Westside Cowboy will release their debut album, It Goes On, on August 21 via Island, staying deliberately close to the community-driven, unpolished sound that has defined the Manchester quartet, DIY reported. The band, drummer Paddy Murphy, vocalist and guitarist Reuben Haycocks, vocalist and guitarist Jimmy Bradbury, and vocalist and bassist Aoife Anson O'Connell, formed after meeting during freshers week at Manchester's Royal Northern College of Music.

The band's rise has moved quickly since then. They won the 2025 Glastonbury Emerging Talent Competition, a victory that led to them opening the festival's Woodsies Stage to kick off the final day of last year's event. More recently, they made their television debut on Later... with Jools Holland, an experience Murphy described as nerve-wracking despite the preparation. "Every now and then with this band we're let into a room that we feel we shouldn't be in," he said.

Haycocks said the band leaned on repetition to steady their nerves before the TV appearance. "We felt like some work experience kids or something," he said, comparing the pressure to sitting an exam. Bassist O'Connell recalled the format catching the band off guard entirely. "They don't give you chairs and they film the whole thing live!" she said, describing the band scrambling to figure out where to sit moments before performing.

The album follows two earlier EPs, "This Better Be Something Great" and "So Much Country 'Till We Get There." Haycocks said the band deliberately protected the "bedroom sound" of their early jam sessions rather than chasing a bigger, more polished production. An early version of the record was tracked at The Diamond Mine in New York with producer Loren Humphrey, but the band ultimately re-recorded it closer to home at Leeds's Greenmount Studios. "We thought the first album should be made in England considering our journey," Haycocks said.

O'Connell said the song "Coyote" came together just days before the band entered the studio. "We literally wrote it days before we went into the studio because we were leaving a space open for something that came along," she said, calling it a departure from what the band would normally attempt.

It Goes On arrives as the culmination of that fast rise, built around the same close-knit, playful spirit the band brought to Glastonbury and to their national TV debut. The album marks Westside Cowboy's first full-length statement after a run of high-profile indie showcases, with the record tracked on the release calendar.