Chainsaw pen a fable of relationship anarchy with ‘Cannonball’.

By Hard of Hearing on August 10, 2026

The young band flex a knack for lyricism and storytelling in a debut album that bursts with joy and angst.

Photo: Charlie and Charlie | Words: Jessie Smith

Condensing the emotional anarchy of modern-day romance into 41 minutes, ‘Cannonball’ by Man/Woman/Chainsaw is a call-and-response album. The London band present their debut LP as an 11-track conversation, embodying the dizzying peaks and self-immolating lows of limerence and the desire to be chosen.

Coming out of the newest phase of the ‘Windmill Scene’ (which has a Wikipedia page, make of that what you will), it’s easy for a band to simply drop down and give you ten different versions of what the last band you saw did. Man/Woman/Chainsaw offer up a debut album that harnesses the power of evolution and adaptation, the band’s core unit of Billy Ward and Vera Leppänen having made music together since the age of 14. The charm of a band beginning in the schoolyard is eternal, but not every teenhood group gets to come of age, and not every Windmill ensemble will make it onto an NME 100.

The album launches with the triumphant violin riffs of ‘Only Girl’, performed by Clio Starwood, who immediately cements the instrument as a lyrical heartbeat for the collection. Experimental rock has been rife with folk and orchestral implementations since the take-off of Black County, New Road. Yet Man/Woman/Chainsaw succeed where others have faltered. This is underlined by Starwood’s presence, which is filled with such great purpose, versatility and momentum from the jump. Starwood ducks and weaves through the songs, a pivotal role in the ending of the second track ‘Canyons’ forming a momentous crescendo that sounds more like a heavy guitar solo from a pop-punk track.

‘Goddamn Lizard Man’ and ‘Lighter’ speak to one another directly, and you have had this exact conversation with a friend, I promise you. Your friend, she’s seeing someone and he is a number of four-letter-words. You’re worried, you’re stressed, you’re trying to talk some sense into her:

“You’ve gotta get out, you’ve gotta get out. He’ll chew you up and spit you out. He’s wicked man, a goddamn lizard man”. (‘Goddamn Lizard Man’)

But as you are preaching, your friend is writing up a paragraph text to him:

“Know the patterns in your hair, like I know you everywhere. Lay my head on your chest, I’m safest in your sheets” (‘Lighter’)

And that is roughly the point where you snatch away her phone and throw it into oncoming traffic.

The placement of these two songs next to one another feels intentionally contrasting. One heavy rock banger bringing guttural and narrative plea from Ward, against a tender and almost R&B expression of yearning from Leppänen, repeating the lyrical motifs of possession and want set by opener ‘Only Girl’ (‘I’ll let you have my skin / I owe you everything’).

The alternation between rejection and euphoria is true to life, and it continues through the next two tracks. ‘Nosedive’, with Emmy-Mae Avery and Ward’s vocals in a perfect compliment of one another, builds and builds into a choral plea between its counterparts to let one another go. ‘Get Up and Dance’ follows, careening back into the yearning for someone’s total desire and dedication.

We start to spin out towards the end of the album, reality kicking in and unhappiness outweighing adoration. ‘The Thing’ and ‘Still Angry’ hit where it hurts, painting portraits of heartbreak and rage from very different perspectives. The finale of ‘Something Else To Give’ then displays one last showcase of the band’s total harmony with one another, punctuated by Lola Cherry’s drum beat, which hooks you into the song’s intricate movements. ‘You don’t want what you’re offering’, a devastating line repeated mantra-like over the close, tells a story wherein no one can quite present their wants or be intimate with honesty.

A stellar debut from a young but already seasoned band, ‘Cannonball’ is filled to the brim with both lyrical and instrumental storytelling. Man/Woman/Chainsaw told us in an interview last week that they’d like their legacy to be the “first band on the moon”, and at their current trajectory it shouldn’t take them that much longer to get there.