Man/Woman/Chainsaw have been the worst-kept secret on the London gig circuit for years, and Cannonball, their debut album, finally gives that reputation something to point to on record. The South London six-piece formed as teenagers, sharpened by a relentless touring schedule and a run of increasingly ambitious singles and EPs, have built their name on barely containable live energy: three alternating lead vocalists, careening violin, and a habit of swerving between genres mid-song without losing the thread. The question hanging over this record was always whether that chaos could survive the transition from stage to studio. The answer, emphatically, is yes.
Produced by Margo Broom (Fat White Family) and Seth Evans (Geordie Greep, Black Midi), Cannonball opens with a literal bang, a snare crack detonating into opener “Only Girl,” a shoegaze-and-strings flood of a song that sets the tone for everything that follows: pop songcraft dressed up in art-rock unpredictability. From there, the record refuses to sit still. “Goddamn, Lizard Man!” is one of the heaviest, most abrasive things here; “Nosedive” stretches out into a hypnotic, almost trance-like art-punk epic that trades on just two chords and a slow-build tension between comfort and escape; “Flick of the Wrist” swings into something closer to a tango with the devil. By the time closer “Something Else to Give” arrives, a slow-burning meditation on giving more to a relationship than you get back, the album has covered enough stylistic ground that its cohesion feels like a genuine achievement rather than an accident.
If there’s a single moment built for a room full of people losing it together, it’s the chorus of “Only Girl.” The verses are tightly wound and almost nervy, Vera Leppänen’s vocal circling a request for commitment with mounting urgency, before the chorus blows the doors open into one of the most direct, euphoric hooks the band has written: “I want you undone / Show me slowly I’m your only girl”
It’s the clearest evidence on the record that underneath all the structural left turns, this is still a band chasing pop’s biggest, most communal highs.
“Nosedive,” the album’s six-minute centrepiece, is where Cannonball’s ambitions are most fully on display. Emmie-Mae Avery has described the song as being about an injured bird needing shelter, a metaphor for wanting both safety and freedom from the same relationship at once, and the arrangement mirrors that tension beautifully: “Bird hit the glass / I can’t see in front of me / Let me go on, let me go / Hit a nosedive, cannonball”
Opening on undulating, Kraftwerk-indebted synths before splitting apart into bursts of noise, the track finds its way back to something danceable and cathartic by the end. It’s the most structurally daring song on the record, and also one of its most emotionally direct, which is the trick this band pulls off again and again: burying real feeling inside music that could easily read as pure experimentation.
The rest of Cannonball bears out the scattershot promise of the band’s early EPs, now with the wildness reined into something more purposeful. “Canyons” and “Lighter” pull back into gentler, more reflective territory without losing the record’s underlying tension. “Get Up and Dance” leans into something closer to nightmarish folk despite its title. “The Thing” gallops off into a kind of runaway desert-rock detour, while “Snakebite” and “Still Angry” keep the album’s rougher edges visible even as the back half consolidates rather than expands on the ideas of the first. Critics have been near-unanimous in praising the band’s ability to hold all of this together, the tonal whiplash that could sink a lesser band instead comes across as a defining strength.
Cannonball is that rare thing: a hyped debut that actually earns the hype. Man/Woman/Chainsaw have spent years threatening to make an album this accomplished, and now that it exists, it’s hard to find much to fault. “Only Girl” proves they can write a chorus as big as any of their influences; “Nosedive” proves they can be genuinely strange and still land an emotional gut-punch. A little tonal fatigue creeps in toward the back half, but that’s a minor complaint against a record this rich with ideas. This is a genuine arrival.
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