Westside Cowboy at Future Yard

Manchester quartet Westside Cowboy are having the kind of year most bands only dream of. Winners of Glastonbury’s Emerging Talent Contest, with a ramshackle summer of festival heroics behind them, they arrive at Future Yard fresh from releasing their debut EP This Better Be Something Great on cult tastemakers Nice Swan / Heist or Hit.

Born from jams in drummer Paddy Murphy’s bedroom, Westside Cowboy have evolved into one of the UK’s buzziest new guitar bands. They’re tagging their sound “Britainicana” – slacker rock colliding with country twang, trad flourishes and four-part harmonies that lean towards the 60s. It’s chaotic, melodic, and oddly timeless, with wiry guitars tangling around heart-on-sleeve choruses.

All four members sing, often at once, and it’s in this vocal interplay that the band really lift off – harmonies colliding, competing melodies jostling for space before folding into something ragged and euphoric. They’ve won fans in everyone from Black Country, New Road to Ezra Furman, while critics from The Guardian and NME have praised their “gloriously ramshackle new era of ’90s-styled slacker rock”.

We last caught them at Psych Fest, and their set was one of the highlights of our day. EP standouts like Drunk Surfer and Shells show their knack for irresistible hooks, but it’s the earliest reveal from the EP – ‘I’ve Never Met Anyone I Thought I Could Really Love (Until I Met You)’ – that hits hardest. Driven by rattling drums and fuzzed-out chords, it builds to a cathartic singalong that’s equal parts love song and tongue-in-cheek liberation from musical pretension. It’s a strong contender for the best track to come out of Manchester this year.

With a ballooning fanbase, a debut EP out in the wild, and an album surely around the corner, this tour feels like a big one.