Westside Cowboy's ramshackle Americana – plus the week's best new tracks

The Guardian

2 days ago

From ManchesterRecommended if you like Pavement, Ezra Furman, Guided By Voices
Up next Debut EP out 8 August
Westside Cowboy describe their sound as Britainicana. You get what they mean. The winners of this year's Glastonbury Emerging Talent competition are the product of a burgeoning new Manchester underground scene but started out performing Hank Williams and Bob Dylan covers in drummer Paddy Murphy's bedroom. While the vocals locate them firmly in the UK, there's a distinct country/rockabilly undertow to their sound.
But equally, Britainicana feels like a slightly ungainly term for music that seems so natural and spontaneous. Recent single Alright Alright Alright rattles along at high speed, its influences buried under a layer of fuzz and feedback and punky vigour, the guitar lurching from the central riff into bursts of noisy abstraction: it sounds like a snatched recording of a band playing live, complete with the thrilling sense that their performance is seconds away from collapsing.
The quartet's debut EP is forthcoming, and the first tastes of This Better Be Something Great are more sedate. I've Never Met Anyone I Thought I Could Really Love (Until I Met You) lopes in time-honoured slacker style; Shells starts out as a hushed ballad before unexpectedly bursting into life 90 seconds in. But they're equally marked by a mood of ramshackle invention at odds with the studied, polished air of a lot of current alt-rock. The name, incidentally, comes from the horse riders employed to ensure trains didn't exceed a certain speed in 19th century America: another weird choice, given the velocity Westside Cowboy currently seem to be travelling at. Alexis Petridis
Flock of Dimes – Long After Midnight'People say it's not my problem / They say that actions have a consequence,' Bon Iver collaborator Jenn Wasner sings on a beautiful acoustic meditation about offering help against your better judgement.
Kieran Hebden + William Tyler – Spider BalladFour Tet shatters the Nashville guitarist's arid playing into kaleidoscopic fragments, creating a tense, near-breathless strobing effect that evokes glimpsing horror in half light.
Confidence Man x Jade – GossipGossip's delicious, destructive power is brandished like a weapon on this icy double threat, decorated with enjoyably unexpected acoustic guitar and Jade spitting a very rude word in pure South Shields.
Joanne Robertson – GownThe sometime-Dean Blunt collaborator leads her new album with a song that evokes Sinéad O'Connor's Celtic hymnals heard through Grouper's damp-forest haze – with stirring cello by Oliver Coates.
John Also Bennett – Ston ElaiónaFar from his formative years in the Ohio noise scene, Bennett channels the stillness and swoop of the view from his new Athens home, in gorgeous, consciousness-tweaking ambient bass flute oscillations.
Daniel Avery – Rapture in Blue ft Cecile BelieveThe wildly underrated Canadian singer – and former Sophie collaborator – gets a deserved showcase leading this anguished, expansive and surprisingly pop turn by the British producer.
Chuquimamani-Condori – LRC with Pueblo De Dios Capo E DJ edit
One half of one of 2025's best records – Los Thuthanaka – blesses us with a 24-track collection of edits. On this highlight, whistles and heartfelt chanted vocals fight against hypnotic pile-driver production. [Not on Spotify: listen here]
Subscribe to the Guardian's rolling Add to Playlist selections on Spotify.