Westside Cowboy Carry the Bedroom Sound Into Debut Album ‘It Goes On’

For Westside Cowboy, the last year has placed them in rooms that still feel slightly off-limits. Speaking from their Manchester flat, drummer Paddy Murphy describes the band’s Later… with Jools Holland debut a few months ago as feeling like work experience kids who had practised for an exam. Reuben Haycocks reaches for a different comparison, the kind of prepared instinct a penalty demands, where all the work exists to make the moment automatic.

The quartet formed during freshers week at Manchester’s Royal Northern College of Music and has moved through milestones quickly. After winning the 2025 Glastonbury Emerging Talent Competition, they opened the Woodsies Stage on the festival’s final day last year. Those experiences now feed into their debut album, It Goes On, which follows the EPs This Better Be Something Great and So Much Country ’Till We Get There.

Rather than expand their sound for larger stages, the band has pulled back toward the texture of early sessions in Paddy’s bedroom. “We felt like we really wanted to keep to the bedroom sound we had, we didn’t want to necessarily sound like a big stage band,” Haycocks says. That unvarnished approach shapes the single Pin Up Boys, a track that arrives already carrying the band’s informal, close-quarters energy.