Man/Woman/Chainsaw have had a whirlwind of a few years. After playing their first shows aged just sixteen, and too young to otherwise enter the bars and pubs that put them on, the London six-piece released their debut EP Eazy Peazy in 2024. Across five tracks and an abrasive interlude, the band explored a multitude of styles, genres, and themes, but violinist Clio Starwood and keyboardist Emmie-Mae Avery seemed to have thought something was missing. Now, as they gear up to release their debut album Cannonball, Man/Woman/Chainsaw have found their footing.
The album title came from the song ‘Nosedive’, Avery states. “I think we kind of toyed around with a lot of different names, looking for something meaningful in one of the songs”, Starwood continues. “I was advocating for it to be ‘nosedive cannonball’, which is the whole lyric”. When asked for her favourite track on the album, Avery responded “I think it changes, but ‘Nosedive’ has always been my top favourite. It’s also one of the most recent that we wrote before recording, so it felt quite fresh”. Fresh is the correct term: the song shimmers with mesmeric synth sounds and almost haunting violin, causing teary eyes and tapping feet simultaneously, before bursting towards its end amidst the refrain “baby get me back, up over you”. It sounds like nothing the band have put out before, and manages to strike the perfect balance between catchiness and emotional sincerity. If ‘Nosedive’ is anything to go by, then, Cannonball as a whole is bound to cement the band as masters of their craft – an impressive feat for a debut album.
“My favourite track is probably the closer that’s coming out with the album”, Starwood states, “it’s called ‘Something Else to Give’. There was a lot of debate about whether that should close the album, or ‘Nosedive’. I hope people listen to it a lot, because I don’t think it will be a single”. “I also love ‘Lighter’, it’s a beautiful, sweet little love song”, Avery continued. Concurring, Starwood revealed her own personal connection to the song: “when Vera [Leppänen, the band’s bassist and sometimes vocalist] wrote it and showed it to us for the first time, I cried because I’d just been through a breakup”.
When asked about the range of sounds on the upcoming album, Avery asserted “we’re probably past the ‘Meagan’-ification of our music. We’ve definitely left making a lot of racket just for shits and giggles behind because not a lot of people want to hear that”. ‘Meagan’ is the aforementioned abrasive interlude on Eazy Peazy, demonstrating a Pixies-esque combination of unrelenting noise and interspersed vocals in the form of standalone words and phrases.
Avery describes Eazy Peazy as “two ends of the spectrum, like ‘Grow a Tongue in Time’ [a softer, emotional track towards the end of the EP] and ‘Meagan’, and now I’d say we bought it a little bit closer. There are still songs that have those differences, but it’s just not quite as drastic. There’s still the same duality”. By the sounds of it, Man/Woman/Chainsaw have found their identity in Cannonball.
“Hopefully we’ll never stop developing”, Starwood states, “but I think we’ve definitely reached somewhere where we’re really proud of how we’ve gelled. I still think that next time we write an album, it will reveal more ways that we work well together. Even when I play songs like ‘Adam & Steve’ that we released before the album, I think that the way we do arrangements has gotten so much better. We always used to just play at the same time, but now we’ve learned how to place ourselves”.
“Joining this band absolutely changed my life”, she continues. “Before, I was doing classical violin and going on a path towards playing in orchestras and quartets, and truthfully I wasn’t particularly excited about it. And then I joined this band and it opened up my eyes to the other things I could do with my musical education, and also to the power of live music”.
Avery agrees: “I was at school with the rest of the band at the time we started, and obviously we had different members and the line-up changed around, but I also started doing music by learning piano classically. And then I went to school with these guys and started playing with other people, playing in more rock-based genres as someone who came from a classical background. And starting out, I had no idea about the live music going on because I wasn’t old enough to go to the gigs yet”. “Me and Emmie are the two band members who did have a background in classical music, and I think you can really hear that in the parts that we write and the way we work together. We had the most similar transition”, Starwood concludes.
This classical background, and the wide variety of influences exhibited by Man/Woman/Chainsaw, will be on show at their huge Gorilla headline in September. The band no strangers to Manchester, however, having graced stages such as The White Hotel and YES in the past. “Those are both two of the most awesome shows we’ve done”, Starwood proclaims. “The Pink Room headline was incredibly fun, and I remember that being one of my favourite shows at the time, I thought I’d never played better”.
For their upcoming tour, Man/Woman/Chainsaw have invited “our very good friends” as support acts, and both Avery and Starwood are quick to sing their praises, “especially Uncle Junior, who are from London as well”. “We’ve known them for years”, Avery says, “and Clio plays in a band with two of them. The singer and guitarist in that band was the star in our ‘Nosedive’ music video, so we have some funny ideas for what we’ll do when we play that song at Electric Ballroom. Bathing Suits are incredible as well. They supported us for the first time in Leeds at Brudenell Social Club nearly three years ago; we just thought they were absolutely brilliant and they’ve only gotten better”.
It’s a well-known fact of life that musicians will take inspiration from anything and everything: the world around them, other art forms, and even the people they surround themselves with. Man/Woman/Chainsaw know this better than most, having taken their name from a collection of feminist film criticism. The main art form inspiring Man/Woman/Chainsaw now, however, is “friendship, if friendship is an art form. Real human connection, I really like thinking about how the different harmonies or intervals within the music that we’re writing that can depict that same feeling. I’d also say Billy Ward’s [vocalist and guitarist] style of songwriting feels quite filmy. Like, ‘Goddamn, Lizard Man!’ just makes me think of Godzilla. He’s a big film guy, I think there’s a lot of imagery in his lyrics that makes them not too self-reflective or emotional. They’re more situational”.
These “situational” lyrics are guaranteed to arise once again throughout Cannonball, which is due to land in August. Eazy Peazy took the six-piece to KEXP and SXSW, and into the ears of over 180,000 monthly listeners on Spotify alone. Their debut album, then, has the potential to take them to the stratospheric heights they deserve, and those looking for teasers can find them in the form of ‘Nosedive’, the single version of ‘Only Girl’ and the recently released track ‘Goddamn, Lizard Man!’: listen and see if it’s reminiscent of Godzilla.
