Manchester quartet Westside Cowboy announce their debut album It Goes On for August 21st. New single ‘Kick Stones (The Boys)’ is out now, with a first play on BBC 6 Music and a video shot in collaboration with FC United of Manchester.
‘Kick Stones (The Boys)’ is a propulsive, heady track that encapsulates the four-piece’s innate ability to hit you in the chest with their transcendent indie. Drummer Paddy Murphy notes that the true crux of the song is “as much about how we made it as the lyrics”.
“We loved the way it felt to play, but we thought we couldn’t record it like that or people would think we wanted to be a stadium rock band,” bassist/vocalist Aoife Anson O’Connell explains. Instead, they translated it through their own lens, using a live recording of The Velvet Underground’s ‘What Goes On’ as their primary reference point. “We always thought, if we can pull this off it could be really fun,” Paddy details. “Taking this mad, ‘70s rock thing but then having it played by a bunch of scrawny kids.”
This ongoing creative dialogue took place with the album’s producer Loren Humphrey (Geese, Cameron Winter, Wunderhorse) at Greenmount Studios in Leeds, and this thoughtfulness is apparent across the whole LP. Big feelings are at the heart of the matter: these are songs that aim to distill the confusion, desperation and blind hope of youth into eleven stirring tracks.
In the video for ‘Kick Stones (The Boys)’, they collaborated with local football club FC United of Manchester: a splinter team that started when Manchester United were sold to an American corporation. “They’re very community minded and they have a similar atmosphere to what we want to be,” says guitarist/vocalist Reuben Haycocks. “Their ethos is ‘making friends not millionaires’.”
This is evidence of the way Westside Cowboy have always tried to focus on what unites people. Early on in the group’s life, they co-created No Band Is An Island: a Manchester-based collective putting on fundraising nights to spotlight both local artists and important issues via speakers from charities and direct action groups.
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