The origin story for “Dane Valley,” Man Band’s lead single, is almost too on-the-nose. Chainy Rabbit — the band’s vocalist — got mugged for £50 in Dane Valley park, a notoriously rough part of Margate. So he got jacked. Learned kickboxing. Became, as guitarist Daniel Sargent tells it, “super strong and muscle-covered, so that no one could ever mug him again.” One specific humiliation, one very physical response. It’s exactly the kind of story the whole record is built around.
“Strong Man” — six tracks, 34 minutes, out 17 April on Faith Healer Records — is Man Band’s debut, and it comes loaded with backstory.
Sargent and Rabbit both came out of OHHMS, the UK doom outfit, though under different circumstances. Sargent was out of the band three or four years before it dissolved, not by his choice.
“It was like being dumped by four girlfriends at once,” he says — losing access to the big shows and festivals he loved, but also to the weekly ritual of making music with people he cared about. Paul from OHHMS, he notes, is still one of his closest friends and that wound has healed. Rabbit, who stayed until the end, came away with a different feeling: “We both had a negative taste left in our mouths from the ending of OHHMS, it felt like we hadn’t achieved all we could have.”
When word got back to Rabbit that Sargent wanted to start something new, he had just gotten clean from years of drug abuse. He describes the timing as obvious. Sargent was already playing with guitarist Aaron Jaygo; Rabbit had a friend, Joe, who wanted to get back behind a kit.
The current lineup is Chainy Rabbit on vocals, Sargent and Jaygo on guitars, Dan Bigwood on bass, and Jim Davies on drums — though Rabbit acknowledges a certain attrition rate with a characteristic lack of self-pity: “People keep leaving… especially drummers, maybe we are a bunch of assholes. Maybe we just aren’t very good.”
The two have history stretching back further than OHHMS. Before that band, they were both in a hardcore outfit called Babies Three, which recorded an album fifteen years ago that never came out. That record is finally being released — Sargent and Jaygo run Faith Healer together, and with OHHMS vocalist Paul now on board, the Babies Three album is getting its moment. Rabbit’s own EP is out on Faith Healer too.
“Strong Man” isn’t a doom record or a hardcore record.
Man Band describe themselves as genre fluid heavy music, and the tracklist supports that — “Dane Valley” runs under five minutes, “The Nutter” stretches past seven, and closer “Ian’s Song” clocks in at nearly ten. Both of them knew going in they didn’t want to replicate OHHMS. Rabbit wanted to strip things back; Sargent, who’d been in hardcore before the doom years, wanted to get faster again. The album lands somewhere between those two instincts.
Thematically it’s a record about masculinity — the toxic kind, the non-toxic kind, and the uncomfortable territory between. Rabbit wanted to step back from the more explicitly political approach of previous work and examine the subject without a fixed position: “I wanted to become less preachy with our political views and look at subjects from opposing sides.”
Gender, the manosphere, the culture around physical reinvention and male identity — it’s been unavoidable, even more so since the Louis Theroux documentary. Lyrically “Strong Man” covers new love, sexual excitement, deep loss, guilt, sadness, and anger.
The thematic territory gave Sargent pause. “I was a bit scared of the topic,” he says. “I didn’t want people to think that we were in any way supporting those sexist homophobic racist types.”
It’s a reasonable concern — and one he’s clear about: “The hardcore scene I grew up in was about accepting everyone as an individual and I still live by that today.”
The current band includes members of different genders, age groups, sexualities and races.
“Strong Man” is out 17 April via Faith Healer Records.
