\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div> \t\t\t\t\tWestside Cowboy in Manchester, July 2026.<\/span><\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSamantha Corcoran for Rolling Stone<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n \n\t\u201cAs a teenager, I mainly listened to string quartets and the top 40, which was not the coolest thing in the world,\u201d she says. She went to school to study cello, and hadn\u2019t sung in front of anyone since she was 13 years old at church. Belle and Sebastian <\/a>and Sufjan Stevens<\/a> were her gateway drugs, and when she met the rest of the band, they mostly just got together to have a good time and play Lonnie Donegan <\/a>covers, almost like an after-school club. Everything else around them seemed so serious, so precious.<\/p>\n \t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n \n\tThey wanted to reconnect with what they loved about music as kids, like \u201cwhen you find that weird album that someone cool has recommended to you and it\u2019s like, \u2018This is now everything to me,\u2019\u201d Murphy explains. \u201cTrying to return to that feeling of genuine excitement about music.\u201d And to blatantly ignore any and all ideas that rock & roll might be dead<\/a>, or at least endangered.<\/p>\n \n\tThey wrote their first original song by accident, and when more started to come, they set some ground rules to keep it simple, low-stress, and just as youthful as always. Nearly all their songs feature two guitars, a bass, and drums. If they want to add so much as a shaker, then someone\u2019s going to have to figure out how to shake it while they play the instrument they already have, even if it means lacing it between their toes. (\u201cThis is what we currently believe,\u201d adds Haycocks. \u201cMaybe in the future when we\u2019ve all got arthritis, we might think differently.\u201d) Each member writes songs, and they rotate singing lead.<\/p>\n \n\tThe idea was to keep it human, and not try to reinvent the wheel, though they did initially attempt to label their sound, built both on the British rock traditions and American pop culture they grew up around, as \u201cBritainicana<\/a>,\u201d a term they seem to ever so slightly cringe at now.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cAt the time, everyone was a post-punk band in Manchester,\u201d Murphy says. \u201cIt was a fun way to say we weren\u2019t that. It\u2019s more like British bands have been loving American music, and American bands have been loving British bands, and it\u2019s just a continuation of things.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThey played gigs locally, eventually catching the attention of Loren Humphrey<\/a>, known for his work with artists like Geese. He produced Westside Cowboy\u2019s second EP, and then signed on for the debut album.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cWhat attracted me to band initially was the energy,\u201d Humphrey tells Rolling Stone<\/em>. \u201cTheir ability to take a song and push it far beyond the recommended operating level while somehow still finding a way to land on their feet and crescendo a split sec before the wheels come off and the whole thing spirals down into the ravine. It felt so youthful to me, not in the way of culture or age, but more so in its velocity.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tIn the studio, they held strong to their founding ethos: \u201cIt doesn\u2019t have to be original. It doesn\u2019t have to be anything,\u201d says Haycocks. \u201cWe\u2019ll write the songs as if we\u2019re other people and write the simplest, funnest things that we possibly can.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSamantha Corcoran for Rolling Stone<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n \n\tTheir single \u201cKick Stones (The Boys)\u201d is a good example of how well that formula worked. The Velvet Underground<\/a>\u2019s \u201cWhat Goes On\u201d was the reference point, but it the looseness keeps it fresh, with Haycock sometimes singing as if he\u2019s racing against an hourglass and sometimes drawing each syllable into a slow ramble, meeting O\u2019Connell on harmonies. A bit of Bradbury\u2019s inner Julian Casablancas<\/a> comes through on songs like \u201cDobro\u201d and \u201cBig Wheels,\u201d \u00a0the alternating vocalists making everything feel like a family joint, tentacles instead of a single-celled organism. Almost every track explodes into a satisfying crescendo (though they can write an equally killer ballad that never does, like \u201cTake My Leaving As I Love You,\u201d where you can hear the buzz of the room in the recording).<\/p>\n \n\tWestside Cowboy are also big on community. The community of an audience, which they observed while on tour with Geese, and the community they can create within and beyond the band itself. Haycocks has been reading about Blue Zones<\/a> lately \u2014 the idea of countries where people live the longest \u2014 and he\u2019s found that one of the biggest predictors for longevity was being around a lot of people, all of the time. \u201cThat magic of doing things with other people can literally make you live longer, statistically,\u201d he says, cracking a joke that Mick Jagger\u2019s secret might be that \u201che\u2019s got loads of mates.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
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