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LONG ISLAND, NY — Tabytha Polaris has spent years helping people through holistic healing, essential oils, guided meditation and sound healing, but lurking in the background of her life, with a box full of half-completed lyrics and melodies, was the musician she always yearned to be.
The new four-song EP “Elemental Codes,” is Tabytha Polaris the singer songwriter and multi-instrumentalist breaking out to “entertain people while expanding their consciousness,” Polaris said. “I was inspired to write these songs about the healing powers of water, air, fire and earth. My intention was to fulfill a life dream of writing original music and step into my power as a recording artist,” Polaris said. “There’s something really magical about singing and performing in front of people. There’s a beautiful connection between everyone in the room, you can capture a moment with them and be one. It’s very healing.”
“It’s not necessarily them admiring me, it’s us together experiencing a beautiful moment of emotions and magic. My intention with this album was to have fun, follow my joy and to offer inspirational music but in a contemporary style. I wanted to shine positivity into the world, help others realize the power within and how they can use mother nature for healing during these challenging times.”
Polaris said she’s been a singer her whole life
“I’ve been a musician my whole life, I was a professional singer in elementary school, high school, college,” Polaris said. “I went to Tisch School of the Arts, studied at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute and post graduation I was a studio musician. I did commercials, jingles and recorded vocals on other artists records. I was also signed to talent agencies performing in the cover band scene.”
But then she put music on the back burner for about a decade to dedicate her life to holistic healing eventually opening Hands in Harmony Holistic Spa in Franklin Square N.Y.
“When my Mom got sick I learned Reiki to help her through her cancer treatments, and she’s fine now,” Polaris said. “During that time I learned a lot about eating clean and removing toxins from your environment. I was learning and working with sound frequencies, reiki energy and vibration. After studying sound healing I began to incorporate healing music into my meditations and reiki sessions. I was really missing music and didn’t feel like myself so I joined a cover band and got my singing chops back.”
In 2019 she began writing songs again and realized something was missing in her life.
“Then when the whole world locked down, I had the time so I recorded a guided meditation album to balance the chakras called 7 Spheres of Light at Cove City Sound Studios. After that I had the confidence to bring my original music into the studio and began recording Elemental Codes.”
Polaris said she’s helped a number of people write their own songs and she had a box full of lyrics and half-written songs of her own she’d collected since her college days, but she had never really finished her own original music.
“I changed my mindset and I was like, I’m going to finish this song by myself. Water Codes was the first completed song and was written by singing to my Rev Vast drum. So that was a really special song for me because I wrote it by myself. Then I started to have dreams of songs. If there are muses, they opened up to me, I don’t know how you dream songs and get ideas throughout the day but it became like a floodgate of ideas. It was so magical.”
Then she sat down with a friend, David Connolly, and wrote Earth Codes
“He knew I was writing music so he sent me some guitar cords and we got together. I wrote the lyrics and the vocal melodies for Earth over his guitar chord progression,” Polaris said. “I brought him in the studio when I was recording. He laid down the guitar tracks and the mandolin and I played the flute solo. That was fun to have a co-writer who was also one of my best friends.
The other songs on “Elemental Codes” emphasize the other elements of Earth.
For “Air Codes,” Polaris said she researched the element of air and wrote little phrases that inspired her. The song was 80% complete and then finished it in the studio with her producer Brendan Keenan. “Fire Codes” was different.
“Fire Codes” was a song that came to me in a dream,” Polaris said. “I wrote that so quickly and it’s also inspired by what my true ultimate love would be in an alternate dimension, the perfect guy, and he turned out to be a dragon. Every time I would close my eyes and go to sleep I would be riding a dragon and I'd wake up and remember all these visions. I don’t know if they were real or not or if I'm traveling to different dimensions at night, whatever it was, it inspired me to write the song. I tied in the element of fire with divine love.”
Polaris says “Elemental Codes” was a labor of love and hopes it helps people in some way.
“I felt such a push to do this,” she said. “I feel like I'm very tapped into my intuition and I’m following my true path. If you get a nudge from the universe follow it, I believe the universe will conspire and help you. Just follow your joy and shine your light. I am so grateful for these songs and feel like they will lift people up.”
Follow Tabytha Polaris on her website, www.tabythapolaris.com, and on her social media links and streaming services:
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Westside Cowboy caught up with NME backstage at Reading 2026 to tell us about their whirlwind year, slapping a smile on the face of modern indie, and hopes for “weirder, poppier” new music.
Fresh from the release of their acclaimed and long-awaited debut album ‘It Goes On‘, the rising Manchester alt-country outfit packed out The Ballroom tent at both Reading and Leeds sites.
This was their first time playing the legendary festival, but singer and guitarist Reuben Haycocks came as a young punter in 2019, their return bringing bad a flood of “PTSD” from that heady weekend. This time through, they were one of the most talked-about acts of the weekend – and certainly one of our highlights.
From winning the Glastonbury Emerging Talent Competition last year to then smashing Glasto before R+L, does anything phase the recent NME cover stars anymore?
“A lot of things phase us, every day,” replied fellow singer and guitarist Jimmy Bradbury. “It’s a strange one. We have a very lovely team of people around us who help keep us sane. I feel like we’re still playing music with our friends, and that’s the way I hope it stays.”
He continued: “We’re at that stage of a tour now where we’ve been away for a very long time and we’re questioning our own existence. Is this real? Are We real?”
It’s been a whirlwind year for the NME 100 alumni, starting with supporting Geese on tour back in March when they called at London’s iconic Hammersmith Apollo. What was it like to be part of that bubble of hype and madness?
“We were sort of leeching off the bubble,” replied Haycocks. “We were very lucky to get that tour and they were so lovely. Generally the atmosphere of the whole tour was great and all the crowds were amazing. Hammersmith was the first time I ever walked on stage and noticed how big it was. We’re excited to hopefully play our songs to that many people who know them, now that the album is out.”
Bradbury agreed: “That was one of the first stages where you go out and you immediately notice and take in the history that’s been there: Springsteen’s first London concert, the last ever Ziggy Stardurst concert – which I was watching the other day and his guitar player Mick Ronson is amazing. There’s a moment where it’s really dark, the lights flash and you can see Bowie being projected onto the side of that place. It still looks the same as that and it’s an amazing venue.”
Still, the band modestly that admit that the highlight of 2026 so far has simply been putting out their debut album.
“I don’t know if we intended to go this far, but we’re here and we’re liking it,” Bradbury admitted. “There are so many different stages to putting an album together: finding which songs, recording the songs, mixing them, getting your masters back and it’s like, ‘We’ve done it!’ Then you get the cover back and it’s like, ‘We’ve done it again!’ By the time it comes to releasing it, you feel like you’ve done it already five times. It’s a moment of it finally just clicking together and it’s really exciting.”
Speaking of how it feels to finally have the record out in the universe and have listeners understand their true selves, Haycocks shared: “We’re making an effort to read reviews as little as possible, considering we’re already on tour and questioning our existence. My dad will send me a bit of a review that’s really nice, and then just to ground me he’ll send me a horrible comment, just so I don’t get above my station.”
“We’ve just played, and it was nice to see people sing the words to songs that were sort of new to us. Seeing people with their arms up in the air and knowing these songs that were once just a thought, that’s a pinch-me moment.”
The band recently told NME how their primary focus was “bringing the fun back into the music generally” and “taking everything a little less seriously” in terms of songwriting. It’s rarer than you’d hope to share joy at these hellscape times such as this, but it’s admirable. Have Westside Cowboy felt that reflected back at them?
“We could feel it today,” replied Bradbury, speaking of their Reading performance. “There were bucket hats flying off in the air, people had some lovely signs written. We try and keep it light-hearted. There are so many instances from when we’ve been in bands before where you take it so seriously that you run yourself into the ground. Everybody just really try to let go of that. We wanted to do the best we can with what we have and use as few chords as possible.”
Do they feel more new bands adopting that approach as the world continues its doom spiral?
“There are a lot of new bands that come from the scene we come from that do that amazingly: there’s Pushbike, Bramwell, Holly Head, countless, countless bands that have that idea woven in,” said Haycocks. “It’s really lovely to see bands smiling on stage again. Maybe it was a little fashionable to be smouldering for a while.”
We briefly pause the interview to give us their best ‘blue steel’ smoulder. Their attempt gets points for effort.
“Some people can do that really well, and there are some bands I really love that can do that, but most people – especially those who are similar to us – just look like idiots,” Haycocks continued. “It’s nice to see people smiling and looking like they’re enjoying themselves. This should be the thing they want to do, so show it.”
It may seem a selfish question given that they’ve just dropped one of the year’s best-reviewed albums, and we ask only because we know how restless and unstoppable they are, but are Westside Cowboy already at work on album number two?
“We were driving down to London when the album came out at midnight. We all stood up, shook each other’s hands as the van was moving and went, ‘Cool, we’ve got until we get to the hotel then we’ll start thinking about the next one’,” Bradbury told us. “We’ve got a few things floating around, and we’re excited to crack on with it. We’ve been nattering about it in the van a lot. We’ll kick it around a bit and see where we end up.”
Asked where they were looking to take their sound from here, Haycocks shared: “Currently, we’ve been really, really loving a band called Women, we’ve been listening to loads of The Magnetic Fields and we love The Drums, so we would hope that the next album is both poppier and weirder. You never, ever know how it’s going to turn out until you start doing it.
“We want to just continue the journey that we’ve done from the start. The way I described it to Paddy [Murphy, drummer] the other day was that ‘The mists were appearing’. You can’t quite see it yet, it’s not yet tangible what the second album will be but there’s a faint outline there.”
He added: “You describing us as ‘restless’ is a good descriptor. We really just want to get on it and go.”
‘It Goes On’ by Westside Cowboy is out now, with the band heading out on their biggest UK and European headline tour to date this autumn. Visit here for tickets and more information.
Check back at NME here for all the latest news, reviews, photos, interviews and more from Reading & Leeds 2026.
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