Man/Woman/Chainsaw Are Building Beauty Out of Collision
The London six-piece pull guitars, violin, piano and synthesizers into the same room and let them fight for space. Songs begin with restraint, splinter into noise and change direction before they have given you time to settle. It is art-rock with dirt beneath its fingernails: ambitious without becoming sterile, chaotic without confusing disorder for imagination.
– WORDS BY CJ
The band began among school friends, with Billy Ward and Vera Leppänen playing together from their early teens. The lineup grew to include Emmie-Mae Avery, Clio Starwood, Lola Cherry and Billy Doyle, becoming less a collection of musicians than a single, unstable machine.
That is what separates Man/Woman/Chainsaw from the endless procession of bands built around one voice, one guitar and four people waiting for their turn. Every instrument here is capable of disrupting the song. The violin is not decoration. The keys are not there to smooth the edges. Melody and abrasion are given equal weight, each one making the other feel more dangerous.
Their debut EP, Eazy Peazy, captured that tension in full. Produced by Gilla Band’s Daniel Fox, it moves through anxious post-punk, orchestral drama, fractured pop and sudden eruptions that feel seconds away from collapse.
“Ode to Clio” begins almost delicately before opening into a violent, violin-led finale. “What Lucy Found There” twists nervous energy into something theatrical. “Sports Day” sounds like several different versions of the same band crashing into one another and somehow landing on their feet.
The music is restless because the people making it appear restless too. Man/Woman/Chainsaw do not sound interested in finding one winning formula and repeating it until somebody stops paying attention.
Their songs keep dismantling themselves, pushing against whatever shape they appeared to be taking. That unpredictability is becoming increasingly rare.
Too many young bands arrive fully branded, fully explained and fully aware of where their music belongs. Man/Woman/Chainsaw still carry the feeling that something is being discovered in real time. The ambition is obvious, but so is the risk. They sound like a band willing to ruin a perfectly good song in search of a better one.
Start with Eazy Peazy. Let it run from beginning to end. Listen for the spaces where the instruments stop supporting one another and begin pulling the song apart.
That friction is where Man/Woman/Chainsaw become impossible to ignore.
