There is a phase in a young band’s development when they’re starting to find their form, understanding how to harness their collective power, but vestiges of their primordial freeform lunging remain. That’s where we now find Man/Woman/Chainsaw on the rising buzz band timeline. It’s a tantalizing moment for a listener, a window into chaos being wrangled into order while still coursing with volatility.
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.”
