It Goes On

Westside Cowboy — 2026

“It Goes On turns restless guitars, stacked harmonies, and three lead voices into one of the year’s most confident debuts.”

There is always a little worry when a band gets this much hype this fast. The anticipation builds, the expectations pile up, and plenty of debuts collapse under the weight once you finally hear them. For every Arctic Monkeys or Wet Leg that delivers on the promise, I can think of a handful that arrived flat after months of buzz. Manchester’s Westside Cowboy have been carrying that kind of load since their EP So Much Country ’Til We Get There, so I came in ready to be let down. I was not. What holds It Goes On together is confidence. These four are young, ranging from 23 to 26, yet they play like people who already know exactly what they want each song to do.

A lot of that assurance comes from how the songs are built. Almost everything here starts small and grows: a harmony chiming in early, an instrument sliding in for a few bars and then ducking back out, until the last chorus lands somewhere much bigger than where it started. The album takes its name from a line buried in “Paper Chains,” where “it goes on and on and on” works as both a lyric and a mission statement, and that restless push runs through everything. Having three different lead singers gives the record a depth most debuts never find and keeps the eleven tracks from blurring together. Producer Loren Humphrey, who has worked with Geese and Cameron Winter, captures all of it at Greenmount Studios in Leeds without touching up any of its imperfections. The songs still sound like a room full of people working things out in real time. The writing reaches for big feelings without getting precious, and “Worried Age” sums up the mood in one line, “your panic feels more real than a thought.” The record closes with “You Could Have Died There On The Dance Floor” and the line “I am everything but perfect, but I’m trying, so please keep me around,” and that might be the whole album in a sentence.