FEATURE: Spotlight: Man/Woman/Chainsaw

FEATURE:

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Sophie Barloc for The Line of Best Fit

Man/Woman/Chainsaw

_________

A group that everyone should know…

and are making big waves right now are Man/Woman/Chainsaw. Even though I am not a big fan of that name, I do love the music! Comprising of bassist and vocalist Vera Leppänen, guitarist/vocalist Billy Ward, drummer Lola Cherry, violinist Clio Starwood, vocalist and keys/synths player Emmie-Mae Avery, and guitarist Billy Doyle, this is a crew that have delivered one of the best E.P.s of the year with Eazy Peazy. I am going to end with a review of that E.P. Before getting there, it is worth introducing some features and interviews. First, I want to come to a recent interview from The Line of Best Fit. They spoke with the teenage London band. One that are Art Punk but sort of hard to define. A band ripping up the rulebook:

“Songwriting for this collective is fluid – a collaborative process dedicated to merging individual visions into something unique to the Man/Woman/Chainsaw outfit. That’s not to say there isn’t still some vulnerability in bringing a song to the table only to watch it turn into something else. “I think we all probably start a song thinking it should sound a certain way,” Avery muses. “If you listened to the inside of our brains, we’re all probably thinking: ‘this person’s suggestion is shit’,” she laughs, as bandmates shared pointed looks at one another lightheartedly. “But I think the best part is when a song does go in a completely different direction than what you expected, you know?” Leppänen poses. “Because there’s a reason you needed somebody else's brain to think of it.”

“Yeah, the song is so much better once you’ve surrendered it to six people’s mishmash of influences,” concludes Ward. It’s a particular patchwork of creativity that not only makes their music so rich but also embeds within it a sense of that very collaboration. In the sounds they produce, their instruments never compete, instead interweaving a musical push-and-pull. Lighter orchestral notes balance against boisterous fuzzy guitars and sometimes they shape shift, the twinkling now pouring from the guitars while the violin and keys take on the grit.

But, before Man/Woman/Chainsaw were even thinking about writing in this way, before even Eazy Peazy was in the works, this DIY outfit was founding their dynamic approach to making music in the raw energy of live performances. “There was something chaotic about the early gigs,” Ward recalls. “We try to tap into that now, but with more filtering out of the crap.” Cherry carries on the thought: “It started as writing for live performance. Since recording though, we've kind of played the songs a bit differently live. The backbones are the same, but they feel tighter,” she concludes, looking around at the nods of agreement. With over 100 gigs under their belts since debuting at just 16, it's impressive – and a bit surreal – that these young musicians can already tap into their early days for inspiration from their unfiltered expression. “The earliest songs were like, ‘this has a verse where the lyrics are one line repeated four times, a noise section, then the chorus’,” Leppänen recalls with a laugh.

Man/Woman/Chainsaw seem to be a band full of contradictions, their youthful energy contrasting sharply with the depth of their musical maturity. They maintain a DIY ethos while collaborating with seasoned professionals like Gilla Band’s Daniel Fox, who's production helped bring a more polished edge to their output. Despite being firmly anchored in their local scene, they also hold ambitions of touring further afield — Europe and beyond (“O2 arena, 2026”) – already in motion with their recently announced SXSW debut next year.

Yet, there aren't many bands with the same conviction in their own musical language as this indie outfit. As they prepare to unleash Eazy Peazy on the world, the group look forward to what’s next. When Starwood sheepishly asks if she can “dare say we’re on the short little road to finding our sound,” she is met with an answer from Ward that encompasses Man/Woman/Chainsaw: “We found our sound and now we’re taking it apart”.

One thing I am trying to piece together is how many members of Man/Woman/Chainsaw there are. In some interviews they are referred to as a six-piece. However, the review I am ending this feature with labels them as a five-piece. They may need to confirm that, though I will just refer to them as a band and we can quibble over exact numbers. In any case, it is worth coming to Stereogum and their spotlight of the amazing Man/Woman/Chainsaw. Here is a band who are definitely going to be a festival mainstay. I think they will have the same sort of rise and success as bands like English Teacher:

“The youthful London combo, makers of “noisy, unadulterated art punk” by their own description, are dropping their Eazy Peazy EP Friday. Produced by Gilla Band’s Daniel Fox, who’s also helmed great LPs by Sprints and Silverbacks, it’s Man/Woman/Chainsaw’s first release for the longstanding American indie label Fat Possum. With multiple lead vocalists and structures that never seem to repeat from track to track, it’s one of those records where every song has its own unpredictable flavor but they all seem to flow from the same collective consciousness.

Opener “The Boss” surges forward with an intensity that only seems to ratchet up as it goes, bassist Vera Leppänen railing against a composite of awful authority figures as Clio Harwood’s violin morphs into gnarly squalls of noise. One track later on “Sports Day,” guitarist Billy Ward is reliving traumatic adolescent athletic experiences over an off-kilter discordant groove. Next comes “Maegan,” on which Pixies-esque banter quickly gives way to a delightful sonic blitzkrieg. The second half of the tracklist ventures into territory both soft and surreal while bringing back the explosiveness in strategic increments. One of the lessons they learned from Fox in the studio: “If everything’s loud, nothing’s loud.”

The band has come a long way since Ward and Leppänen were 16-year-olds covering Nirvana and Lana Del Rey in a bedroom. (They also cooked up a noise-rock version of Shaggy’s “It Wasn’t Me,” sadly not for public consumption.) The duo spent lockdown learning how to play music, then recruited a rotating cast of bandmates and gigged like crazy around London DIY venues once they hit college. “We would do three, four shows a week sometimes,” Ward says during a boisterous video call with four of his bandmates. “We were just doing lots of shows around London. There’s so much music here that you can just do that when you’re young.”

All those shows helped Man/Woman/Chainsaw figure out where they thrive — “on the thin line between pretty and noisy, often trying to jump between the two,” as Ward has explained in press materials — and to build up a reputation as one of London’s most exciting young acts. The collective approach and orchestral flourishes lend themselves to comparisons with London contemporaries Black Country, New Road, while the interplay between Ward and Leppänen reminds me of indie-pop bands like the late, great Goon Sax.

Last year, the lineup settled into consistency with the addition of Harwood’s violin plus vocalist/keyboardist Emmie-Mae Avery and drummer Lola Cherry. A sequence of early singles on Bandcamp — best of all “What Lucy Found There,” on which Ward and Leppänen trade vocals over hyperactive bass line straight out of a jazz or drum ‘n’ bass track — now play like snapshots of the growth leading up to the roundly accomplished Eazy Peazy. The band members are only 19 or 20 now, but they’re sounding like a seasoned unit.

The EP is full of sharp songwriting and engaging arrangements. Tracks feel epic without extending much beyond the three-minute mark. Each one is full of savvy details, like the dance between Harwood’s strings and Avery’s keys on “Sports Day” or the way Cherry elevates “EZPZ” with drumming that shifts from cavernous half-time to eruptions Ward compares to black metal blast beats. At the center of the tracklist is “Ode To Clio,” so named because Harwood’s violin melody transformed it from its Coldplay-esque beginnings. The band has highlighted it as an ideal introduction to their sound so far.

“I feel like it was the song that best summed up the different kinds of things that we’ve got on the EP. Like obviously we got like ‘Grow A Tongue In Time,’ which is more singer-songwriter-y, kind of pretty, and ‘The Boss’ is a bit heavier and more punky,” Leppänen says. “We wrote that somewhere in the middle, and I feel like it’s kind of brought the kind of two sides [of the band together].”

Although much of the Eazy Peazy material is new to the outside world, to Man/Woman/Chainsaw these songs are old hat compared to the new material they’ve been working on. “For the EP we wrote the songs to play them at gigs because we needed material,” Avery says. “And when we are writing now, we’re obviously writing them to play for gigs and stuff, but it’s nice, ’cause it feels like they’re tied to a project, that we’re writing them towards an album.”

Ward says the band is looking to get more music out soon rather than “taking 10 years to do the album.” In the meantime, there’s lots of touring on deck for early 2025, including a winter UK jaunt and Man/Woman/Chainsaw’s first trip to the States for next year’s South By Southwest. It’s a milestone the band is looking forward to, even if the results of this week’s presidential election have them feeling more wary about the future of America. “I’m scared,” Leppänen says. “But other than that, I’m really looking forward to next year”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Sophie Barloc for The Line of Best Fit

Eazy Peazy is one of the great E.P.s. One that distils and highlights all the band’s strengths but also leaves you wanting more. A sign of where they are now and where they might head. NME were among those who sat down to offer their thoughts on Man/Woman/Chainsaw’s remarkable new work. One that has them tipped as one of the breakaway acts to look out for next year:

“There were multiple points throughout the last decade where it looked like UK indie rock might end up forever stuck in a post-punk loop. Fortunately amidst the familiarity of this latest revival, a crop of young bands went in the opposite direction; jettisoning post-punk’s wiry, pared-down approach in favour of something more ornate, progressive and grandiose.

This thrilling new branch of UK ‘indie’ (if there’s any meaning left in that ageing term) took on myriad shapes, from the resplendent melodrama of Black Country, New Road to the bad trip mania of Black Midi. These ambitious, forward-thinking bands served as welcome evidence that alternative rock music had yet to wholly capitulate to retro revivalism – and Man/Woman/Chainsaw are a quintessential product of this genre-busting era.

Few debuts are as simultaneously bold and accessible as ‘Eazy Peazy’. The likes of ‘Ode to Clio’, which swells from gentle embers to a finale inferno, throws rock music’s familiar structuring out the window, whilst retaining a firm sense of internal logic. Closer ‘EZPZ’ offers a more brute force example, maintaining a gripping intensity across three minutes of intricate and constantly shifting orchestral heaviness.

The band’s fusion of grand strings and pianos with more traditional, riff-based rock chaos is a broad success. ‘Sports Day’ contains one or two ideas too many, with the orchestral melodies erring close to unnecessary cacophony. Elsewhere, however, this OTT approach works with impressive elegance; see the simple but potent violin motif that recurs throughout ‘Ode to Clio’ and the interlocking strings and keys that arrive with immaculate precision midway through ‘The Boss’.

This instrumental melange reflects Man/Woman/Chainsaw’s ultra-contemporary, post-ironic lyrical voice. Like the internet-dominated culture in which they were raised, the band smash through the traditional boundaries that separate irony and sincerity, tilting from arch but soulful school memories of ‘Sports Day’ to the abstract literary musings of ‘Ode to Clio’ (“sprawled across my kitchen floor / she’s only arms and legs / her limbs like hairs / spread out starfish”).

Crucially, these metamodern tonal jumps possess real emotional power, matching the musical bravura. ‘Eazy Peazy’ practically fizzes with youthful energy and the possibilities of musical creation. It’s raw and throws everything in its sizeable arsenal at the wall, however, basically everything sticks. The resulting effort’s audacious energy is a sight to behold and whips with enough force to spin your head clean off your shoulders”.

Go and follow the remarkable Man/Woman/Chainsaw. You are going to hear a lot more from them. Check out Eazy Peazy though their Bandcamp or Spotify page and go and see them live if you can too. They have some great dates in the diary for next year, and they will play London’s Scala in April. An exceptional young band with many years ahead, make sure they are on your radar. I am quite new to them but I am compelled to follow them closely. They are a very…