Man/Woman/Chainsaw are finding the sweet spot between the weird and the wonderful

Man/Woman/Chainsaw are still months away from launching their debut album ‘Cannonball’ – an exploratory, widescreen record that significantly levels up the south London six-piece’s early material, expanding the “runaway art-rock chaos” that landed them in last year’s NME 100 into something no less intriguing but significantly more pop. But singer-guitarist Billy Ward already has the future on his mind.

Man/Woman/Chainsaw on The Cover of NME. Credit: Phoebe Fox for NME

“We have a joke that, on one album, we’re all just gonna get really buff. Like Arnie [Schwarzenegger] buff, where your shoulders are higher than your ears,” he declares, talking from his garden on one corner of NME’s Zoom screen. His fellow vocalist and bassist Vera Leppänen visibly lights up from where she’s lounging in her bedroom: “Like Rhian [Teasdale] from Wet Leg! She looks so awesome. Every time I see her, I’m like, ‘WOW!’”

The future hench-ification of Man/Woman/Chainsaw is something their peers in the early 2020s Brixton Windmill scene didn’t have on their bingo cards, and the recent evolution of the band’s sound – a progression that’s seen them ink a deal with The Cure’s label home of Fiction Records – probably wasn’t either. The group – completed by pianist Emmie-Mae Avery, guitarist Billy Doyle, drummer Lola Cherry and violinist Clio Starwood – started as experimental teens and took their lead from bands like Black Midi, who’d managed to take unlikely instruments and strange sounds and turn them into overground success. “You can listen to Led Zeppelin but you can’t be Led Zeppelin. It’s a lot more conceivable if you’re 17, and there are bands who are 21 and come from the same city and are doing really well, to see that as a path for where you can go,” says Ward.

Billy Ward of Man/Woman/Chainsaw. Credit: Phoebe Fox for NME

However, in the last couple of years, Man/Woman/Chainsaw have been allowing their more conventionally melodic side in, and finding that their idiosyncrasies and pop smarts can exist in satisfying harmony. “I remember feeling so desperate to be outrageous as a kid, but it’s actually chill to just be chill,” grins Leppänen. “And it’s not like we’re going out of our way to make a Top 40 hit. We’ve never sat in a practice room saying, ‘Guys, we need to write a four-chord pop song right now’.” “We still try to make weird choices because what makes great pop great are the things you wouldn’t quite expect,” agrees Ward. “But doing weird for weird’s sake is something we [don’t want to do anymore].”

Reaching this realisation has been a slow and steady process that began when the two vocalists started making music together in 2019, aged just 14. “I remember we played some Beatles songs at a friend’s 15th birthday, which is a fucking jarring vibe for a birthday party, but that’s how we became friends,” Leppänen laughs. A couple of years later, they started performing as Man/Woman/Chainsaw, rounded out by a constantly shapeshifting line-up of “mates playing random instruments”. Avery joined shortly after that, having seen a formative incarnation of the band as her first ever gig. “They said I should hop on and play some keys, and it stuck,” she remembers. “Apart from Clio, we all went to school together, so then we’d do little group projects in class and book out practice rooms for free. It was just a great chance to jam with your mates.”

Vera Leppänen of Man/Woman/Chainsaw. Credit: Phoebe Fox for NME

The haphazard, instinctive way the band grew was integral to their freeform, curious spirit. “I found an old setlist that was insanely cursed: it had five songs and then ‘drone section’ and then a version of a song that just said ‘super slow outro’,” remembers Ward. “We’d write things on the setlist and then figure out on stage what they meant.” However, in 2023, when they landed on the solid sextet that they remain today, the group began to realise the potential that might lie beneath the chaos if they started to sharpen the tools they had. The 2024 single “‘Ode to Clio’ was one of the first songs where we all found our place,” suggests Avery. “A lot before that was us solo-ing over each other and this mish-mash of parts. But that felt like the first moment where it sounded like a song rather than a lot of people playing at the same time.”

Pop is a cornerstone for the six friends. Turn up the stereo in the Chainsaw-mobile and you’re likely to hear “Addison Rae, ‘Gossip’ by Confidence Man and JADE, just bangers really”, notes Avery. During their live shows, they’ve been walking out to 50 Cent’s ‘In Da Club’. (“It’s the perfect hype song in my opinion,” Leppänan enthuses. “The whole hook is about having a fucking great time.”) Meanwhile, Avery has been known to bust out into splits onstage, dropping down mid-set during last year’s headline gig at London’s Scala. “I’ve done a cartwheel on stage before too, but I ripped my trousers so I probably won’t be doing that again…”

Emmie-Mae Avery of Man/Woman/Chainsaw. Credit: Phoebe Fox for NME

Man/Woman/Chainsaw talk about music with a charming and frequently hilarious lack of pretence. “It’s a really silly thing to get in front of people and say, ‘Look at me, playing my instrument!’ I mean, what the fuck? It’s not heart surgery,” shrugs Leppänen, an amusingly blunt speaker who talks like an alt-world Lola Young. Songs, she suggests, are “an unsolicited offering from you to other people”. The subtext is that, if you’re asking for people’s attention, then you’d better make it worth their while.

“We still try to make weird choices because what makes great pop great are the things you wouldn’t quite expect” – Billy Ward

Which is exactly what Man/Woman/Chainsaw have done on ‘Cannonball’. It’s a captivating mix of disparate sounds and styles, from the heart-on-sleeve tumult of strings and crescendoing emotion that forms single ‘Only Girl’, to the underbelly skulk of ‘Goddamn, Lizard Man!’, to the transcendent belting chorus of ‘Still Angry’, which could be given to any main pop girl and turned into a commercial hit.

Clio Starwood of Man/Woman/Chainsaw. Credit: Phoebe Fox for NME

Unsurprisingly, some of the 6 Music dads who first latched onto the band have been less than pleased at their evolution. “We got this hate comment about ‘Nosedive’ on YouTube saying, ‘What’s happened? This band used to be cool, and now they’re making conventional music! Have they signed to The Cure’s label and sold out?’” eyerolls Lepännen. “But bitch, I love Adele’s ‘21’, don’t come at me!” Ward deadpans: “He’s gonna hear ‘Still Angry’ and be like ‘Yes, I am still angry, I’m angry about the choices this band are making’.”

However, for Man/Woman/Chainsaw, there’s no barrier between these sides of their musical personality. They clearly love being a band and collaborate on songs with an impressive lack of ego. “That’s the point, right?” says Lepännen. “You can make music by yourself if you want to make all the choices yourself.” They’re excited about the increasing re-emergence of rock music in the mainstream. “Charli XCX is making that album, and Geese played on SNL, it seems like guitar music is existing on the internet in a way that I haven’t necessarily clocked before. It’s fucking cool,” she continues.

Billy Doyle of Man/Woman/Chainsaw. Credit: Phoebe Fox for NME

But what truly excites them is the opportunity to take their influences and put their own playful spin on things. “Not to sound like a boomer in the corner, but so many of the good moments in music over the last 70 years have been people going, ‘Here’s this thing we grew up on, and it’s a bit lame now, but let’s do it ourselves, and we can change it without being precious about it’,” suggests Ward. “You can’t make the same thing, but you can take a thing you like and play with it, and it doesn’t always have to be holy.”

Take the ‘Cannonball’ track ‘Nosedive’, which, depending on which band member you’re talking to, nods variously to LCD Soundsystem, Stereolab and The Blue Nile. Recording his first batch of vocals for the album on ‘Goddamn, Lizard Man!’, Ward was encouraged by producer Margo Broom to channel his inner Nick Cave for the vocal delivery. “That came into the vocals, but then five other people came in and made it a different thing,” he explains. There is even, NME suggests, a hint of ABBA’s ‘Chiquitita’ in the melody of devotional ballad ‘Lighter’. “What a great song,” Ward nods, happily. “Is that in the movie?” “Yes, they sing it when Donna’s crying!” Lepännen replies instantly. “I love ABBA, so sick…”

Lola Cherry of Man/Woman/Chainsaw. Credit: Phoebe Fox for NME

There’s an easy camaraderie, even from three separate Zoom screens, that immediately shows why Man/Woman/Chainsaw work. If, in the beginning, they were fighting for sonic space, playing everything, everywhere, all at once, then ‘Cannonball’’s varied dynamics – sometimes intense, sometimes comparatively restrained – show how far they’ve come, and the leaps you can make when you sit back and listen to each other. “It’s jarring if you have a load of ego. I don’t want to fucking talk to you if you’re like ‘blah blah blah’,” Lepännen decides. “The whole point is you have to chill, because if we don’t get along, then we’re gonna end up like the fucking Smiths. And who wants to be like Morrissey? No one.”

Man/Woman/Chainsaw seem unlikely to enact their own Morrissey v Marr inter-band bust-up, but their debut might well let them get what they want: the chance to keep expanding their sonic universe and having a laugh while they’re at it. “And we want to be the first band on the moon. I’ve said it from day one,” Lepännen interjects. “You know grass in space grows in a spiral because there’s no gravity? We’re gonna do that musically,” posits Ward. “That happens in an episode of Trailer Park Boys where they grow space weed,” Avery chips in as Ward decides, sagely, on their true destiny: “We’re going to be the first band to grow weed in space.”

Man/Woman/Chainsaw’s ‘Cannonball’ is out August 7 via Fiction.

Listen to Man/Woman/Chainsaw’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.

Words: Lisa Wright
Photography: Phoebe Fox
Label: Fiction Records

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