Essential new collections also featuring Man/Woman/Chainsaw, Nina Winder-Lind, Elanor Moss and The Cramps.

Westside Cowboy – ‘It Goes On’

Westside Cowboy need no introduction. This Manchester four-piece has captured attention worldwide with their confident guitar work, folk-rock sensibilities and bold harmonies. Since releasing their first single, ‘I’ve Never Met Anyone I Thought I Could Really Love (Until I Met You)’ in 2024, the band have been at the forefront of British guitar music, and their debut album, ‘It Goes On’, shows exactly why. Powered by Paddy Murphy’s passionate drumming and the unparalleled triple harmonies of Aoife Anson O’Connell, Jimmy Bradbury and Reuben Haycocks, the album brims with excitement, energy and anticipation. The opening track, ‘Kick Stones (The Boys)’, introduces the dynamic instrumentation that defines the record. Embracing these musical and vocal crescendos, ‘It Goes On’ feels vibrant, rebellious and unstoppable. Staying true to their guitar roots, Bradbury and Haycocks’ twangy guitar riffs complement the album’s celebration of human connection. It is impossible to separate Westside Cowboy from their Northern roots. Tracks like ‘Dobro’ and ‘Paperchains’ reflect on childhoods full of hope, regret and loss, all set against the imagery and memories of the songwriters’ upbringings. In this light, the album is as much an electrifying indie-rock record as it is a cathartic release for the band. Combining the agonising lyricism of “panic” and “carless death” (‘Worried Age’) with their quintessential rising chords and harmonies, it bursts with a desire to escape, to live, to be free. Each member’s individuality shines through, but the album’s strength lies in their collective experimentation and fervour. Despite the explosive instrumentation and the constantly turning ‘Big Wheels’, Westside Cowboy crafts an album that builds, excites, pauses and reflects. Their closing plea, “please keep me around,” in ‘You Could Have Died There On The Dance Floor’ is a request hard to ignore. (Grace Palmer)

Getdown Services – ‘Massive Champion’

Squeezed into the outer perimeters of a remarkably packed Getdown Services crowd at Green Man Festival this year, the phrase ‘everyone and their mother’ had never felt so spiritually accurate a descriptor for the hodge-podge demographic enthusiastically belting along to the duo’s new album ‘Massive Champion’. The Bristol-via-Minehead pair have been a firm HoH favourite ever since their irreverent 2023 debut ‘Crisps’ and, via a series of stylistically drifting, earworm-scored EPs and an endless stream of sold out live shows to increasingly large audiences all over the world, their sophomore album – out now via Breakfast Records – once again delivers.

Boasting a heart that is both two sizes too big and, sweaty and shirtless, furiously thumping at the centre of the dancefloor, the many shades of Getdown Services on record augment each other in a way that showcases their incredibly eclectic songwriting talents – and their propensity to get that one line stuck in your head for days on end (I’m looking at you, ‘The Radiator’). A mixture of the mosh-ready, groovy disco rock that steams up their live shows, and much gentler, nostalgic introspections that twinkle like fairy-light memories of vulnerable childlike innocence, here Getdown Services, in many ways, present an emblem of everything good left in a world enshittifying more and more each day. You know: having a laugh, being who you are, caring about people, taking your old man to see a show, jumping around and shouting ‘you fucking bastard’, dancing like you’re six again. It doesn’t get much better than that. And no, I’m not crying, I’ve just got something in my eye. (Hazel Blacher)

Man/Woman/Chainsaw – ‘Cannonball’

Condensing the emotional anarchy of modern-day romance into 41 minutes, ‘Cannonball’ by Man/Woman/Chainsaw is an 11-track conversation. Together, these songs embody the dizzying peaks and self-immolating lows of limerence and the desire to be chosen. Coming out of the newest phase of the ‘Windmill Scene’, it’s easy for a band to simply drop down and give you ten different versions of what the last band you saw did. Man/Woman/Chainsaw offer up a debut album that harnesses the power of evolution and adaptation, the band’s core unit of Billy Ward and Vera Leppänen having made music together since the age of 14. The charm of a band beginning in the schoolyard is eternal, but not every teenhood group gets to come of age, and not every Windmill ensemble will make it onto an NME 100. A stellar debut from a young but already seasoned band, ‘Cannonball’ is filled to the brim with both lyrical and instrumental storytelling. Man/Woman/Chainsaw told us in an interview last week that they’d like their legacy to be the “first band on the moon”, and at their current trajectory it shouldn’t take them that much longer to get there. (Jessie Smith) [Read the full review here]

Nina Winder-Lind – ‘Wild Love’

Nina Winder-Lind’s debut solo album ‘Wild Love’ is unflinching in its acceptance of emotionality. Unafraid to embrace humanness in its rawest form, Nina (also of Brighton four-piece The New Eves) conjures a spirit broken open, recklessly alive and deeply entwined with its past. ‘Wild Love’ is a dissected body pouring forth its soul, which bears all the fleshy realities that come with a life fully lived. Half recorded in a converted church in Bristol, ‘Wild Love’ carries with it a remarkable sense of devotion. Unlike the piety of religiosity, Nina’s devotion to human vivacity runs rampant – it attacks, it crumbles, and it remains self-assured. In particular, this emotion is driven towards both an untrammelled animalism and unapologetic reconciliation with selfhood and femininity. The former is crystalised by the forceful vibrato of the most intense lyrical moments on tracks like ‘You’re Not An Angel’, ‘Hymn’ and ‘Love You So’. The latter is established by the unbridled freedom envisioned by ‘Girls’ but reaches its apex on closer ‘Foremothers’. This climactic conclusion is full of demise, hope, aching and choral harmonies. It grapples with the loss of childhood, the pain of adulthood and the longing to make proud the women who stood before you and the women who succeed you. As a whole, ‘Wild Love’ fashions a familiarity of female family members, devotion, platonic love and impassioned dreaming. The album is dense with these ancestral branches; branches that have blossomed, branches that have snapped, branches aeons old. (Grace Palmer) [Read the full review here]

Elanor Moss – ‘The Knife, The Needle’

Elanor Moss’ debut album possesses a poetic quality rarely found these days. Record label executives try to trick people to believing that universality is the key to success, that its only when something is broadly relatable for a mass of hands to hook onto that it will work. On the flipside, in the camp of the likes of Phoebe Bridgers and Adrianne Lenker, it is hyper-specificity that wins, as if simply laying secrets bare is the cheat code to good art. Elanor Moss sits outside of this binary, its poetry not overcomplicating or oversimplifying but instead sitting in the golden middle ground occupied by the best of Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. Lyrically, ‘Fixer’ is flawless as an exact example of all of this. “Somewhere deep down / I’m afraid that if I show you the knife / You might use it on me baby,” Moss sings. What a line. What a perfect line. As Matthew Herd’s saxophone playing dances over the top of Moss’ simple yet sweet and stunning folk guitar playing, the song somehow feels like a breathing, feeling thing. ‘Fixer’ alone could make this album an instant classic, but Moss just keeps delivering. The record is teeming with songs which are crafted such that lyrics, instrumental and message all work as one beautiful unit. It’s an album with classic bones and real substance, sure never to fade. (Lucy Harbron) [Read the full review here]

The Cramps – ‘Gravest Gravy’

The release of ‘Gravest Gravy’ on August 21^st constituted the first ‘new’ Cramps album in 23 years. The songs were originally recorded in 1977 during a cluster of sessions at Ardent Studios in Memphis with Alex Chilton producing which resulted in the band’s first single. However, for reasons still unclear today, the rest of the project was shelved. Now, at last, this lost quasi-debut album has been unearthed and restored in all its lurid glory. In its final form, ‘Gravest Gravy’ is every Cramps’ fan’s dearest dream, featuring material you would have heard, had you been lucky enough to see the band live during the first stretch of their storied career, including a slew of covers and early versions of songs that would become audience favourites. ‘Weekend on Mars’ cleverly twists the format of a classic two-and-a-half-minute rock song into a sci-fi B-movie. A cover of Paul Revere and the Raiders’ ‘Hungry’, banishes the tinselly production and tongue-in-cheek innuendo of the original recording, infusing it with a sense of actual menace like only The Cramps can. Then, laced together with Ivy’s deft, churning chords, ‘Can’t Find My Mind’ features an eerie echo effect slapped onto Lux’s vocals, as though he was so disconnected from his mind that he was phoning in his vocals from the farthest reaches of outer space. ‘Gravest Gravy’ is a pertinent reminder of Ivy and Lux’s mastery of their art, and of The Cramps’ rightful place in the annals of rock and roll history. (Ingrid Jensen) [Read the full review here]