Westside Cowboy dig for acceptance on their second single, “Shells”

Westside Cowboy have been honing their raw and rousing approach to guitar music, lovingly termed “Britainicana,” for a year or two now, but it wasn’t until late 2024 that they let the rest of us in on it. After signing with Nice Swan Records and linking up with English Teacher’s Lewis Whiting to produce their debut single “I’ve Never Met Anyone I Thought I Could Really Love (Until I Met You)”, Westside Cowboy quickly charmed audiences and assumed their place as the genre’s newest indie darlings, delivering heartening live performances and a fuzzy slacker sound.

Now, fresh off the back of a Glastonbury Emerging Talent Competition win, the Manchester-born band reaffirm that title with their second single, “Shells”. Placing dual vocalists Reuben Haycocks and Aoife Anson O’Connell at the forefront once more, the new track leads with their delicately intertwined voices, quaint harmonies dancing around tentative twangs. But Westside Cowboy can only hold the quiet for so long.

Soon enough, those hushed vocals give way to urgent strums and a thudding kickdrum, each instrument gaining in intensity as the track hurtles towards its climax. Depictions of clenched jaws and gripped knuckles become declarations of conditional love and relieved breaths, a sense of growing freedom and security in their words. “Done enough in my life to deserve the air I breathe,” the band affirm, “Now sadness this time could not mean anything to me, so I’ll just sleep with a gun.”

“‘Shells’ is broadly about acceptance,” the band explain, “Whether it is the acknowledgement of what you have, or the acknowledgement that change is inevitable. The song is loosely based on a film, in which the character masters this. We have yet to reach this point though. I suppose it’s a little more earnest, and it starts slow, but it kicks in soon enough.”

Evolving with unwieldy sincerity and ever-intriguing dynamic shifts, Westside Cowboy are quickly cementing their distinctive sound and place in contemporary guitar music. “This better be something great,” Haycocks and O’Connell affirm at the outset of “Shells”, and it sure is.