“Whenever we feel like we’re just sort of swept up in the ‘industry,’ we now know that if we just go into Paddy’s bedroom and try and write a song, we’ll… I don’t know, feel like kids again or whatever,” said Reuben Haycocks when Paste interviewed Westside Cowboy in late 2025. Their January EP, So Much Country ‘Till We Get There, captured that idea, threading folk songs (“Strange Taxidermy”) through foot-on-the-accelerator racket (“The Wahs”). It was a mischievous foreword to Haycocks, Jimmy Bradbury, Paddy Murphy, and Aoife Anson O’Connell’s talents, but the fruits taste much sweeter in chapter one. On It Goes On, Westside Cowboy aren’t swept up in anything but the chugging magic of portal-opening rock and roll. There’s no harm in calling them the most exciting young band in the world right now. That’s exactly what they are. I hate the current state of rock music because it largely exists in two disappointing halves. You’re either a washed-up leatherette dissing Anthony Fantano or doing Beggars Banquet-era Stones for the TikTok algorithm faithful. I don’t think “newness” is the answer; the whole concept of the rock band started with theft, after all. But there’s a lethargy spanning continents: the new Fontaines D.C. single sucks, my 2010s faves are turning into Billboard slop, and major-label contracts are dulling our sharpest indie darlings. Frankly, I’m not impressed by guitar music anymore either, unless it’s bizarre and maximalist like Joshua Chuquimia Crampton’s or talkative and pastoral like Hayden Pedigo’s. But the bends and scratches in It Goes On are undeniable. On it, a scrawny skiffle troupe breaks loose from the conservatory, dosing its trad-folk instincts with pure adrenaline. These are four people who don’t copy bangers so much as make fresh shapes out of them: “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” and “Proud Mary” get thrown sideways in “Big Wheels”; Mo Tucker’s vibrato materializes inside O’Connell’s velocity in “Coyote.” Every hook and skronk grabs me by the shirt collar. You know how Bob Gibson was so good at twirling the pill that MLB had to lower the pitching mound just to bring his stats back down to earth? Westside Cowboy attack rock and roll so hard the letters get rearranged. We critics may need to redraw the grading scale. Each lead single could be “Song of the Year” come December, so I don’t blame anyone for prattling on about them. But It Goes On does damage elsewhere. The outro solo in “Coyote” is a four-alarm guitar attack, while Bradbury’s vocal in “Patchwork” tiptoes on a deckle edge before vanishing into a paragraph of his and Haycocks’ hammer-ons. Lock into the feverish jangle of “Paper Chains” and you’ll be repaid with a three-chord melody gripping like a python. In the sedated “Take My Leaving As I Love You,” Haycocks finds a “With God On Our Side” strum and stacks his voice on top of O’Connell’s during “Well Done Kid You Did It.” Westside Cowboy’s members are in their early twenties but already thinking up lines like “the seasons turn but they won’t change, and they sure won’t take you with it.” What a perfect rock inferno they’ve unleashed: even the quiet parts will swallow or split you. At the top of the record emerges the FC United battlecry “Kick Stones (The Boys),” which blisters like “What Goes On” just popped its cork at the Matrix in San Francisco (a prompt to which I have a near-Pavlovian response). Westside Cowboy are in total forward motion here, singing about plastic-covered cars swimming in rain that sounds like bells. If you like rhythm guitar, you’re gonna love this: Britainicana trance music restless with garage-rock nerve, noodly infinities, and Murphy’s insane drumbeat. It’s part-choogle, part-backwards Bo Diddley, part-Wedding Present spank. And there’s no chorus, just the “have you heard that the boys, they are gone this time” refrain repeated over and over by Haycocks and O’Connell. I’m blown away by the sonic assault and by this unforgettable line from Haycocks: “You know you got a face like a bullet when you talk like that.” They’re liable to name a building after him for singing that. “Pin Up Boys,” a Paste pick for “Song of the Week,” nosedives into similar guitar overdrive, twisting through tempo and timbre above Murphy’s wallop. “If nothing else, at least I looked alive,” Haycocks cracks, as if he’s asking the band to raise a singalong around him. And they do. Westside Cowboy call “Dobro” their “strut song,” and I couldn’t agree more: the opening riff ricochets between catcall and combustion like T. Rex’s “Bang A Gong (Get It On).” Bradbury’s vocal is bowstring-tight while twin electrical-fire guitars arc around him; he sings about a resonator standing on its hind legs before hanging a plea in the air when the track starts to bottom out: “If you care, please come home.” Every second of It Goes On is intoxicating, especially when Murphy’s snare rolls under Haycocks’ and Bradbury’s face-melting dyad in closer “You Could Have Died There On The Dancefloor.” But the best song on the record sits at its center. Haycocks and O’Connell duet through “Worried Age,” blurring the line between heartbreak and post-adolescent discomfort, where “your panic feels more real than a thought.” It’s an inspired anthem that comes of age when O’Connell’s voice overtakes Haycocks’ and hurls us skyward. There’s more soul in these kids’ monotone voices than on albums made by artists twenty, thirty years their senior. This music is living, vibrating proof that you can conquer the world if you’re in lockstep with your best friends. It Goes On is the most brilliant rock release of the year. [Island] Matt Mitchell is Paste‘s Editor-in-Chief. They live in Los Angeles.