Meet Man/Woman/Chainsaw, the teenage five-piece making a thrilling noise

“We’ve learned through our mistakes,” Man/Woman/Chainsaw singer Billy Ward explains of the teenage troupe’s musical evolution. Playing music with bandmate Vera Leppänen since the age of 14, their band has gone through multiple iterations in terms of both personnel and musical styles, with a trial-and-error approach now landing them a label deal with Fat Possum and an innovative, brilliantly exciting sound.

Playing over 100 gigs while slowly releasing their first music via Big Richard Records, the now-five-piece gained a reputation as a thrilling live band, and upcoming debut EP Eazy Peazy sees them translate it onto record.

Ward credits the introduction of Clio Harwood on violin and Emmie-Mae Avery on piano as a huge reason behind their current sound – a chaotic but carefully crafted update on the south London sound pioneered by Black Country, New Road, Black Midi and others – while admitting that Man/Woman/Chainsaw will always be evolving.

Listen to new single ‘Ode to Clio’ and read our Play Next interview with the band below.

How has the band evolved since you first started playing together?

Billy: We met in secondary school and just started messing around in bedrooms in lockdown. There have been lots of people who have come in and out, and we used to just ask our mates who played piano or whatever to come in for a few gigs. But when Emmie and Clio came in, the violin and piano definitely brought some special sauce.

Vera: I’m really happy with the form that we have now. A lot of bands are having really huge line-ups now, and that big sound is trendy.

Billy: The more you add, the more different ways it can go.

Vera: And if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! There’s a reason everyone’s doing it – it sounds cool.

What different tastes inspire your band’s sound?

Billy: We all like very disparate stuff. We’ve also become less afraid of bringing random shit in. Poppier, folkier.

Vera: I write songs in a singer-songwriter way. Billy is better at writing for a band.

Billy: But I want to get towards the singer-songwriter thing!

Vera: The grass is always greener…

Your new song ‘Ode to Clio’ took a year to write – is that amount of time typical for how you write?

Billy: That was quite long… It’s hard to get six people in a room.

Vera: It became so many different things. When the song came out, I was looking through my voice notes app for early versions of the song. I found a voice recording of myself on the bus singing it. We called the guitar the ‘Coldplay chord progression’.

Billy: We were going to call the song ‘Coldplay-ish’.

Vera: We thought it might be a bit too poppy for us, but then we realised that Coldplay are rich and we’re not. We’re coming for you!

Billy: We’re not coming for Coldplay.

How did playing so many gigs early on help your sound evolve?

Emmie: It all happens by accident!

Billy: We’re not just all putting on our headphones and listening to heavy music, but we’re also not just listening to Adele.

Vera: I am! 21, what a record!

Tell us a bit about your debut EP Eazy Peazy – how and when did it come together?

Billy: It’s the product of a year of messing around and writing. Now we’re thinking about things as more of a body of work, but we were writing to play live. If we liked playing the songs live and they sounded good, we kept them, and otherwise we dropped them. This EP is the ones we didn’t drop.

How was working with Gilla Band’s Daniel Fox on producing the record?

Emmie: He’s so cool. His advice was, ‘Just play better!’

Billy: He was kidding and saying, ‘Let the spirit of rock move you!’, but we took that advice!

Vera: He was recording with us until 3am, which was so nice of him.

Billy: On the last night we were recording violin through full guitar stacks and sub bass and other crazy shit.

Vera: We asked to listen to it after it was done and he said, ‘No! I’m tired!’

Has signing to Fat Possum changed what you think this band can do moving forwards?

Billy: I’m so excited to keep making tunes. That’s what’s fun – writing music and playing it in front of people.

Vera: We wrote the EP songs to play them live, not really thinking about recording them. Now that we have recorded it, there’s potential for the new songs that we’re writing now to be recorded in a different way. One of our new tunes is called ‘Fishgirl’, about a girl who turns into a fish… she drowns.

Billy: Kind of a bad fish!

Vera: We were talking about orchestral arrangements for stuff now, which is a really fun change.

Billy: Our recordings moving away from what we can physically do as a band is an interesting prospect, but the core of it is the same.