“The only way of making it is by making a living.” It’s the quote that Man/Woman/Chainsaw live by. The band’s vocalist, Billy Ward, attributes it to Rush’s Geddy Lee, despite the fact that after a quick Google search, there’s no record of him having said this. But the misattribution almost doesn’t matter. “The goal posts always move,” Ward says, on a Zoom call alongside guitarist Billy Doyle. “The idea of ‘making it’ maybe isn’t such steady ground to be on.” For a band poised to be the next big thing, this is a telling place to start.
Press releases note them coming from South London, a scene that, through its independent venues, has already produced more than its fair share of next big things: black midi, Shame, Black Country, New Road, to name a few. But not only are they not quite from South London – Ward only moved there to study at the BRIT school, while Doyle grew up in North London and went to school in South London – ask them about inheriting the legacy, and Doyle deflects it immediately. “I don’t know if there’s any kind of ‘post-punk Excalibur’ that gets passed down,” he says. “It’s just your environment, and that environment is just as much the internet, just as much our school, just as much how we are socially as it is the music scene”. It would be fairer, then, to say that M/W/C are products of the broader independent music scene that’s emerging from venues up and down the country – not just London.
They’re about to release Cannonball, their long-awaited debut album, but they’ve been building towards it for a while. Earlier singles like ‘Adam and Steve’ and ‘What Lucy Found There’ arrived before any album existed, and yet they already had a coherent and distinctive logic. In ‘Adam and Steve’, rolling violins – not guitar – carry the melody through the verses, subordinating the more expected instrument to something more oblique. In ‘What Lucy Found There’, an opening bass flurry, as chaotic as it is calculated, gives way to a spoken-word breakdown that plunges the track into freefall before ending with a sudden, decisive stop. It lands with the gravitas of a much more experienced band. What ties these tracks together isn’t genre, though post-punk, indie, and classical all colour their sound. It’s the precision of their dramatics; the sense that every twist and turn might be the one to finally make a track give way.
“There’s obviously going to be some kind of clash on some things, but that’s what makes it so good” – Billy Ward
Making an album meant asking those instincts to operate on a longer timeline. Rather than trusting instinct and calling a run of bangers a record, they had to build what Doyle calls a “sonic narrative” – how songs sit together, what kind of story you’re trying to tell, what should be massive and what stays close, finding “a steady path throughout that your ear can really follow.” “[It] sounds annoying, but it’s true,” Ward apologises. The practical reality underneath this ambition was chaotic. ‘What Lucy Found There’ was recorded “in actual shavings of time” – one-hour studio slots carved out around other commitments, including the not-insignificant logistical challenge of getting six people in the same room. Weeks often passed between sessions on the same track. “You always feel like you’re running out of time,” Ward says. “But somehow it always just gets done.”
“I think we’ve gotten better about thinking about kind of being concise with our songwriting, our production, our arranging, and all of that” – Billy Doyle
The album came with producers too: Seth Evans, who worked with black midi and Geordie Greep, and Margo Broom, known for Fat White Family and Big Joanie. When eight people try to make a song, they’re all going to have opinions. “There’s obviously going to be some kind of clash on some things, but that’s what makes it so good – if there weren’t people really invested in it, it would just sound bland and boring. It’s the push and pull that makes the album sound how it does.” The central lesson they learnt, though, was restraint: leave space, don’t play all at once, earn the grand moments by making them rare. Ward elaborates: “If it’s just noise the whole time, everyone trying to do the most amazing things all the time, we just sound like mud.” By the time they were tracking the album’s final songs, the band had been reshaped by the process. “I think we’ve gotten better about thinking about kind of being concise with our songwriting, our production, our arranging, and all of that,” Doyle reflects.
Cannonball isn’t even out yet, and they’re already thinking past it. They’ve sold out London’s Scala, worked with Evans and Broom, and have an album on the way. Not too long ago, these things were “a bit of a pipe dream”. Now they’re just the current view. “I can’t wait to have our sophomore slump,” Doyle says, and he means it as something to aspire to. The real ambition is a discography: albums that differ from each other but share the same DNA, including “the ropey album that you love because it’s weirder than all the others.” Success, to M/W/C, looks less like arrival and more like accumulation.
That DNA, it turns out, might be stranger than expected. It takes some nerve to name your third single from the album ‘Goddamn, Lizard Man!’, or let the five-and-a-half-minute title track run on ticking instrumentals. In conversation, these feel less like provocations and more like natural extensions of how their minds work. Ask what’s inspiring them right now, and Doyle goes straight to “weird, terrible pseudoscience reels on Facebook”: Atlantis conspiracy theories, giants, ancient history filtered through colonial mythology. “I’m not a nut,” he adds quickly. “It’s just entertaining on so many levels.” Ward, meanwhile, reaches further back: Prince’s Sign ‘O’ the Times. “Consistent weirdness in different facets of things, different kinds of music,” he says. “That level of work ethic and consistent greatness. It’s so admirable.” Two completely different answers, arriving at the same place.
What’s striking, in the end, is how little Man/Woman/Chainsaw resemble a band waiting to be anointed. They came up in London, they played the rooms, they absorbed what was around them, and now, one misattributed Geddy Lee quote at a time, they’re starting to build their own story. Cannonball is out in August, but the goalpost, as ever, has already moved.
Cannonball is out August 7th via Fiction Records
Words: Sophie Flint Vázquez, no use without permission.
Photos: Charlie Charlie via PR
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