Miss May I On Album Number Eight ‘No Place For me’

‘It’s hard to put into words how miserable the end of that experience was for me, and it’s multiple reasons. You know, you’re never happy when something goes wrong professionally, but then any time something that personal goes wrong, you also start looking inward, and a lot of self-judgment.’

Miss May I founding member and bassist Ryan Neff is sitting with me today as Miss May I prepare for the launch of album number eight, No Place For Me, out on October 2.

While that comment can be attributed to his time with another band – which we will get into more later – that journey does flavour the content of the new album. ten tracks of dark metalcore, which opens with a haunting and maddening wailing guitar effect in Sanctuary and finishes with the same effect in new single Highbrow Thieves.

‘Sometimes you put those in, and you hope somebody picks up on it. You don’t know sometimes, ’cause you don’t get the opportunity to talk directly like this about the songs as much. I appreciate you noticing that. That’s cool. It’s a bookend on that album; I appreciate you noticing such a little nuance there.’

‘I think there’s so much more of that when I started listening to music, ’cause it was so much more common to have to listen to a record all the way through. It’s really changed the dynamic with streaming. I really love the original dynamic as a vinyl enjoyer, where you just put the thing on, you go start to finish. I don’t think a lot of listeners would notice that because there’s so much skipping around.’

The working relationship between Ryan and vocalist Levi Benton stretches back to the first embers of Miss May I in high school and the fact they can approach album number eight, nearly twenty years later, with the same ferocity, is a testament to their character.

‘The cool thing about the way Levi and I work is we basically have a set of topics when we start the record. You hope to find overlap in all the topics so that we can assist each other in writing the parts. Usually we’re gonna follow Levi’s lead, because he’s the one that’s gonna do most of the talking about these sort of things. It’s such a dark record, but it’s, nice when you do have the overlap in, subject matter, and then we can work through it.’

‘As far as the tonality, everything is made individually, like song by song. I believe it’s ‘Sanctuary’ and ‘Highbrow’, right, is what you’re referencing? I think that particular effect just ended up in there twice, and then you’re looking at it and you’re trying to come up with the track listing, and you notice a little nuance there and this seems to be, while not purposeful, this seems to be the way that it was supposed to lay out. It made most sense to have ‘Sanctuary’ up front because it is more quintessential Miss May I, while ‘Highbrow’ is one of the curve balls on the record, I would say. It made more sense for it to be later in the record.’

A dark record it is. My notes suggest depression, isolation, betrayal, Catharism and rebirth all flow through the album. As the first Miss May I album since 2022, one does have to ask whether this darkness has anything to do with Ryan’s own journey in the controversial As I Lay Dying band a few years ago which prompted the earlier answer. Here he elaborates.

‘The new record is a chance to get that off my chest. Another one for me is just to prove that I did have so much more to offer. It’s an important process to me to get through. The difficulty of the last couple of years for myself. As painful and difficult and miserable as it has been, damn, it makes for way better music! So, I hate that I had to go through such a disappointing and personally embarrassing circumstance. It really did motivate me to write more connecting stuff, and it’s funny how maybe mine is directed to that specific thing, but I felt that also overlapped so often with something that Levi would be feeling.’

‘The thing about a lyric set is you can make it so specific that it’s completely obvious what you’re talking about but you can also write it just specific enough that people know what you’re talking about and still have enough room to adapt it to the situation that they’re in and connect with the song. Which is the most important piece of the puzzle for me because I can write songs for myself about whatever I’m going through all I want, but I think the thing that really is gonna be more cathartic and help anyone that’s writing songs, is releasing them and knowing that they connected, whether it be for the reason you wrote the song or not.’

‘Once you release the song, it’s not yours anymore. It’s the listener’s, which is also why you don’t hear me telling people what my favourite Miss May I stuff is and what my least favourite is because it doesn’t matter. People fall in love with a record based on where they were in their life and how that record connected to them, and I could write a record that is 100% exactly the same on tempo, exactly the same tunings, type of riffs, and as another record, and it still won’t connect with a fan who loved that previous record the same way ’cause that’s not why they connected to it. The sound is what they love, but what they really love is how it connected with them in that particular time.’

Other than Ryan’s deeply personal lyrics, this album shows his musical chops, tracks such as Pray For Silence and Death Threat stand out tracks for the low end to drive through, and power the song.

‘Nick Sampson has been on our records as a producer, a co-producer for ‘Deathless’, ‘Shadows Inside’, ‘Curse Of Existence’. So, this is his fourth one in a row. He’s been the other band member unofficially for years. With him having full creative control this time and being the lead producer, I could stick my foot in there and be like, “This is what I wanna do,” and he really understood what I wanted to do. I wanted the beginning of ‘Death Threat’ to be a different tone than the rest of the song and a lot of the rest of the record, and that’s because I said, “Hey, this is what I’m looking to do!’ He’s awesome, and he’s like, “Yes, that would be cool, let’s figure out how to do that in a awesome way.”

And an awesome album was birthed.

Interview By Iain McCallum

NO PLACE FOR ME IS OUT OCTOBER 2. PRE-ORDER/ PRE-SAVE HERE…