MISS MAY I have shared the music video for "Highbrow Thieves", the closing track on "No Place For Me", which arrives October 2 via Solid State Records.
The title sounds like it is about robbery, and it is — just not of anything you can carry out of a building. "'Highbrow Thieves' is written from the perspective of someone worked to the bone, taking orders from people with no remorse for who they're giving them to," vocalist Levi Benton explained. "The 'thieves' here aren't after riches or objects — what they're really stealing is something far more valuable: Time."
Benton has described the album as the hardest kind of writing to do honestly. "'No Place For Me' is everything I've felt for a long time but never had the words for," he said. "Writing it taught me who I actually am even when that hurt to look at. It's a full journey: Where it started, what I discovered, and where I am today."
It took two years, and it is the first MISS MAY I album made without founding guitarists B.J. Stead and Justin Aufdemkampe, who left in 2024. Elisha Mullins came in — he had been filling in before he was a member — and the band that had written together since high school suddenly had to find a new starting point. "We got into a room, and he's, like, 'Okay, where do we go?'" Benton recalled. "And we're, like, 'Oh, shoot. Those guys aren't here.' We're, like, 'We don't even know where to start.'"
What came out of it was a four-piece rewiring its own sound. With the rhythm guitar gone, the band leaned into keyboards and texture instead of patching the hole. "We'd sort of take rhythm out, the rhythm guitar, and we're playing with soundscapes because we're a four-piece, but we've never got to play with those sounds," Benton said. "I think it sort of sounds like old MISS MAY I, but... we've never had soundscapes until now."
"No Place For Me" is the follow-up to 2022's "Curse Of Existence" and the band's second release for Solid State after the 2024 fully re-recorded fifteenth-anniversary edition of "Apologies Are For The Weak".
"No Place For Me" track listing:
- Sanctuary
- Portrait Of Pain
- Hand Me A Halo
- Pray For Silence
- Death Threat
- Die On The Vine
- Fire Falls
- Bury Me Down
- Ashes Of The Altar
- Highbrow Thieves