Miss May I vocalist Levi Benton has described the band’s eighth album as the point where a changed lineup stopped treating continuity as a reason to play safe. In a Rock Sound interview published on 13 October, Benton said the writing divided naturally between experimentation and what he called ‘Miss May I 2.0’. That balance is the clearest way into No Place For Me, which arrived through Solid State Records on 2 October.
Longtime guitarists BJ Stead and Justin Aufdemkampe left in 2024, while Elisha Mullins joined Benton, drummer Jerod Boyd and bassist Ryan Neff for the new record. Benton told Rock Sound that the shift changed more than the personnel: the current four-piece shared the songwriting more broadly, giving each member a stake in material that once began primarily with the two departed guitarists.
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A riff band with fewer guardrails
The process still began with riffs. Benton said the band built lyrics in the room from the feeling of the music instead of arriving with a fixed subject and forcing it over the instrumental. What changed was how far they were willing to follow those first reactions. Across ten songs, No Place For Me keeps the twin-vocal and melodic-death-metal pull that made Miss May I recognisable while leaving room for industrial textures, leaner production and less predictable arrangements.
Isolation without a clean resolution
Benton connected the album title to the feeling of carrying something privately until speaking about it reveals that the experience is shared. He described songwriting as a place where he can say things that remain difficult in therapy or ordinary conversation. That makes the record’s openness more than campaign language: it comes from a method the band have learned to trust over two decades, with each album beginning where the last one stopped emotionally.
The interview also explains why Miss May I have not chased the increasingly polished end of modern metalcore. Benton pointed to Darkest Hour, Killswitch Engage and In Flames as lasting reference points and said the band deliberately stripped back parts of the production while many peers moved in the opposite direction. No Place For Me does not reject change. It argues that progression can mean exposing the machinery of a band rather than hiding it under another layer.
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