Man/Woman/Chainsaw: The Best of What’s Next

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There is a moment on “The Boss” where Man/Woman/Chainsaw punch themselves into this beautiful synth and violin tapestry, only to let their sprawling rupture into crushing guitars and a kind of drumming that sounds like it’s about to puncture a hole in the ozone. The band—Billy Ward, Emmie-Mae Avery, Vera Leppänen, Clio Starwood, Billy Doyle and Lola Cherry—make music that lingers inside of you like a migraine. They’re the next great whiplash band, cut from the same calico as other Brit troupes channeling scorching punk static through maddening, symphonic, tempo-shifting volatility.

That chaos spills into my post-soundcheck call with the band, as they shuffle into the alleyway behind the 100 Club in London on Halloween night. They’re about to play a hometown show as headliners for the first time ever, an accomplishment measured by the fact that Lola has never had to bring her full drum kit to a venue before. Much of their family is coming out to the show, even Vera’s dad, who usually sticks to his general rule of going to one Man/Woman/Chainsaw show per year.

Man/Woman/Chainsaw began when Billy and Vera met in secondary school, getting together to perform cover songs for fun during lockdown. They were in a film club when they were 16, and Billy noticed a book on the shelf titled Men, Women and Chainsaws. The Carol J. Clover-penned, feminist tome of essays about horror cinema became an unlikely source of inspiration for the band, who thought it “sounded cool as a name.” “The final girl is always a virgin,” Vera says, “and she’s always religious and she’s always—” “Like me!” Billy shouts.

When COVID-19 restrictions were lifted in the UK and bands could play gigs again, the band played around 100 shows in London in less than two years. “The lineup changed, the songs changed and, then, about a year ago—maybe a bit more now—we became the six-piece and we’ve been more focused,” Billy says. “Our stuff’s gotten better.” With their show numbers in triple digits, the band (all of whom are teenagers) contends that gigging isn’t any easier despite the exposure. “We’re playing better venues and we’re playing in different places outside of London, but it means the stakes are higher,” Lola says. “It’s more expensive to get out there. There’s pressure to fill a room. It’s gotten harder, but it’s gotten funner and it’s become more rewarding, as well.”

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Being young and playing a calendar year’s worth of shows isn’t encouraged or discouraged in London. In Billy’s words, it’s just what people do. “Also,” he adds, “we weren’t very good, so we had to get good.” The Windmill in Brixton, in particular, is a hotbed for up-and-comers, having nurtured acts like black midi and Jockstrap over the last half-decade. “It’s very much the birthplace of bands,” Emmie-Mae says. “They’ll give bands who might be starting up and aren’t necessarily that great yet [the chance] to get going. That’s really what they did for us.” “We were playing really bad shows,” Lola responds. “And they let us come back again and again and again.”

Man/Woman/Chainsaw recognize that the downswing of the music industry and gig over-saturation can be felt in London, but that it hasn’t stopped the local scene from succeeding. “You can go to 10 venues on a weeknight and there’ll be five bands in each of them,” Billy says. “There’s so many bands around that there’s just such a culture of it here, one that allowed us to mess around.” And the age-restrictive venues that continue to hinder DIY momentum in the States are all but extinct across the bond—especially if you’re, like Man/Woman/Chainsaw, “university age.” “You can start younger, because we were playing at pubs and bars at 16 but pretending to be 18,” Vera adds.

When the band started, its direction was, as Lola puts it, “Let’s try and make the sound good.” “It was tricky,” she continues. “It was really hard for a while, to navigate so many instruments and figure out how they all fit together. Taking things away, putting things back, doing that again and again—even if you think you’ve written a really sick part, but it’s messing with the lead line, you have to let go and find somewhere else to put it.” But, it has gotten easier. “It feels like we can, even when we improvise, weave together in a way that makes sense,” Lola adds. The band’s identity began to take shape through immensity and through six components of style colliding with each other. Man/Woman/Chainsaw are an erudite bunch who are quite difficult to pin down. They’re certainly not trying to rip off the Strokes or Sonic Youth. “There’s such a big book of people—a vast wealth of bands that we can look to,” Billy reckons. “Our influences are super broad,” Vera affirms. “It would be really hard to pinpoint even one person that we’d want to be. I think that those disagreements actually work.”

The band’s recent EP, Eazy Peazy, was made without a true plan—instead becoming a product of having a setlist of material but only three singles (“Any Given Sunday,” “Back/Burden,” “What Lucy Found There”) out in the world. Nowadays, Man/Woman/Chainsaw are working on music knowing that they’ll be taking it, eventually, into the studio—using tools they might not have access to on stage and reveling in their own excess, unafraid of laying down a track that may never be funneled into a live setting. “We’re in a really good vein of writing songs that are really ripping live,” Billy says. “There’s songs that we want to be really in your face, proper live songs like we used to write. But, we’re looking at everything we write now in a project, portfolio way—whereas with the EP, it was much more just putting songs together.”

Eazy Peazy wasn’t conceptual, but now the group is considering how every piece fits into place with more intentionality and not being so precious about finding their sound and ripping it apart in the same breath. They play the songs better now, as opposed to how they might have performed them a year ago when they were still quite green. “Having self-recorded has changed that for us, in a way,” Lola says. “Before, we were doing lots of sections and the structure didn’t really matter. It wasn’t that important. Now, we want to play songs as songs.” Having a reference, like the EP, that they can listen to backstage or in the van in-between shows doesn’t hurt either, and it’s helped the band know their own material better and compartmentalize how all six of them fasten into such a gargantuan oneness.

“Even Emmie’s piano sections, when she’s alone and doing her thing, we’re like, ‘Is that what that sounds like? That’s crazy,’” Lola continues. “I’m mostly hearing a few bits, not everything together. It gives me an idea of letting other parts do their thing and holding back. It gets everything to work together a bit better—it means that things are flowing easier and it feels like what we’re making now all really does fit together in a weird way.” “That might be because we’ve practiced writing songs and we’re a bit better at it now,” Vera interjects, laughing. “We’re still a new band,” Lola concludes, pointing at how she, Emmie-Mae, Doyle and Clio were all later additions to the band, after some membership turnover: “And we’re still getting used to each other.” If that’s the case, they sell themselves well on Eazy Peazy—marking their composite chemistry with surging, palaver melodies.

“What Lucy Found There” was an especially pivotal moment for Man/Woman/Chainsaw, released in October 2023 and becoming a good measurement of where the six-piece was heading—especially because it was the first track featuring the finalized lineup, with Emmie-Mae on keys, Clio on violin and Lola on drums. Vera and Billy wrote the song together from scratch around Christmas 2021, but only because they were supposed to have a rehearsal that no one came to. “We wrote the tune, I got sick and [Billy] didn’t. I wore a mask the whole time, but then I got Covid,” Vera says. “That was the Christmas I spent with a banjo, because I couldn’t give it back to you,” Billy adds.

The formula for writing has changed a bit since then, as Man/Woman/Chainsaw are all showing up to rehearsals now. They’ve started to take a more “songwriter-y” approach than what you might extrapolate from the EP. Billy, Vera and Emmie-Mae still share lyricist duties, all of them often taking charge of their own parts and then, as Lola puts it “do it again and again and again so that it’s right.” “One of us will write a song, something fairly simple just to get words down or get a structure down, and then, once we’re arranging it with the band, we’ll go back and do the strange transitions and reshuffle it,” Billy explains. Lola brings up how folks have been asking for the band’s Spotify after hearing them play, to which she replies with, “Oh, but we have so much better songs!” before quickly remembering that those people won’t get to meet that material until it’s played live. “Songs don’t exist to other people until they’ve heard it,” Vera adds. “For us, these songs are songs—we know them, they’re fully written, finished songs, but nobody else knows them.”

“Ode to Clio” is the band’s self-proclaimed centerpiece, because it “has everything,” according to Vera—it’s mellow and sweet, and the breakdown is spacey, noisy and synthy. “It’s got singing and it’s also got a bit of shouting,” Lola muses. “All of the things that we can have in a song.” Emmie-Mae surmises that it’s a “good balance of the EP,” capturing all of the different things the group likes, “noise-wise.” The band waited a minute to record it and the rest of Eazy Peazy, because, despite having built a name for themselves as a growing live act, making the leap to a recorded project meant rising up to meet the precedent they’ve set during gigs. “I do think it probably is quite trendy at the moment, as well, to have nothing out and be a bit mysterious,” Vera says. “But, at the same time, there is a proper testament to that, because it’s like, ‘Hell yeah, that’s how you like to hone your craft. That’s how you practice it.’” “I like the idea that we’ve now got an actual portfolio—enough songs for it to be representative of what we’re going, and I’m looking forward to having a catalog of stuff,” Billy continues. “I can only hope it’s the first of lots of releases. I’m really happy with how it sums up how we started doing this thing.”

Man/Woman/Chainsaw made Eazy Peazy with Daniel Fox of Gilla Band, whom they opened for in Manchester but idolized six, seven years ago when they were all 13, 14 and 15—when, as Billy puts it, he and his bandmates were “first finding out about music that’s not the Beatles.” “I mean, it is the Beatles, all of it, isn’t it?” Vera questions. “Everything is, yeah,” Billy concurs. Before joining on for Man/Woman/Chainsaw’s Fat Possum debut, he worked with groups like SPRINTS and Silverbacks. While they ricochet off the same experimentation and post-punk textures as them, Man/Woman/Chainsaw, however, have a very everything-but-the-kitchen-sink style of composition, a temperament of unpredictability that Fox was good at counteracting their youthful ambitions with bluntness.

“We did quite a lot of takes, because we were recording live bass guitar and drums, and we were like, ‘What should we do better? Do you have any advice?’” Lola recalls. “He was just like, ‘Play it better.’ Us all together, especially when we have nothing to do, are quite annoying. We’re children and we’re annoying, and he was fine with us. Sometimes, he was like, ‘Guys, fuck off if you’re not going to do anything,’ but he was really lovely.” “He had so many stems of truth,” Billy adds, before Lola and Emmie-Mae say “Let the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll move you” in unison. “‘Everything is loud, nothing is loud,’ he said,” he continues. “It’s quite a good representation of the live sound. There’s not crazy arrangements or overdubbing. There’s some vocal dubbing and guitars and a few layered violins, but these things that were really raw to begin with really benefited from that kind of thing.”

An obvious side-effect of that “everything is loud, nothing is loud” approach is the absurd, head-splitting, minute-long Maegan that pairs Pixies-recalling, mid-song chitchat (“It’s Charlie’s birthday” oozes out of the anti-melody) with schizo piano notes, fuzzed out, incongruent guitars and disgustingly claustrophobic percussion. Elsewhere, “The Boss” finds the group doing a 180 and collapsing into themselves, skyscraping through Emmie-Mae and Billy’s gang vocals: “Keep a score, that’s cool for us, but if there’s more then give it up.” The track growls and simmers, like hot piss bubbling in a crushed-up water bottle.

A song like “Grow a Tongue in Time,” though short, is a “stream-of-consciousness look at jealousy, desire and self-pity.” Beginning with a single, throbbing bassline and gentle, spaced-out piano notes, Vera’s singing swells in volume as Clio’s violin pitches up alongside her after droning in the background. “I won’t do anything,” Vera repeats over and over, and the song crawls into a coda. There’s a menacing aura that stretches around the calm, as the intensity shivers through emotion and an undercurrent of bowed guitar. “Grow a Tongue in Time” sounds like a figure skater spinning infinity symbols on the ice, but Man/Woman/Chainsaw convince you that an ankle-break is lingering close by. Hearing patterns like that, it’s no surprise that Man/Woman/Chainsaw got an early co-sign from Dry Cleaning, one of the best UK bands going right now. I ask them about the significance of such a shout; “It’s gas,” Billy says. “On the road, you meet so many people, and it’s nice how nice people in bands can be.”

Eazy Peazy is a delirious and transformative gesture; a paragon of DIY, stage-born grit recoiling through a smorgasbord of sounds that are as pretty as they are wicked and eruptive. The school spirit-admonishing, athletics-and-trauma-sourced “Sports Day” might just be the very best post-punk song of the year thus far, as Clio’s violin aches like a fiddle while Billy, Emmie-Mae and Vera harmonize “the jocks are leering, muscles glisten in the August sun” together like they’re conjuring the Waitresses more than, say, Parquet Courts. So, what’s the X-factor for a band like Man/Woman/Chainsaw? Billy, from far away in the alley, yells out a single word: “Friendship!” Everyone else jibes gleefully. What’s next for the band? Well, right now, they’re writing songs that are all named after animals.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.