MISS MAY I play the Glasshouse Feb. 21 photo: Travis Shinn
Ohio-based metalcore group Miss May I have returned to their heavy, thrash-filled roots with the release of their newest album Deathless. Miss May I will be touring this album, hitting the Glass House in Pomona Feb. 21. This album not only inspired fans to rekindle their love for metalcore, but also became a release and sort of personal memoir for the band’s personal trials and tribulations over the course of the years.
“We had a really rough two years — that was the biggest inspiration — and we wanted to sort of tell our fans what we were going through as a band and why we felt the way we felt,” Levi Benton (vocals) said. “It was cool because we haven’t written an aggressive upset record in a long time, so it was a first for us as well. We knew it’d be a cool little left hook sucker punch for our fans.”
Although the twist of events didn’t seem a positive one, turning the negative into an album truly became a blessing for the band.
“Ah, man, if you name it, we went through it,” Benton said. “Just contract stuff and personal stuff. It was like, when it rained it poured, it was really crazy. The only reason it was so dramatic for us was because we sort of never really had anything negative really happen in our careers. If that stuff didn’t happen, I don’t know what kind of record would have come out.”
Beginning with the title track “Deathless,” it was apparent that the band was set to revamp not only their sound, but also how the world, their fans and the music industry would view them. “You think you can take all that I’ve made?/Remember it’s another part of me/I will save another day to follow the dreams that will set me free/To follow the dreams that will set me free.” And follow their dreams they have. This album launched the music industry into remembering the beauty of mid-2000’s Miss May I and even landed them in Billboard’s Top 20 album list.
“’Deathless’, I think is the best song we’ve ever written,” Benton said. “We wrote it in a day. The cool thing about that song is that we already knew Joey (producer) and usually when you go in to new producers, it takes about a week to learn how the producer works and how he likes to do things. But Joey we knew for years, so we walked in, unpacked and started writing. We listened to it and we were like, ‘This song is so sick.’ It sucked because it was the first song and it was our favorite song, so it set the bar for the rest of the record. Every time we finished another song for the record it’d be like, ‘This is good, but it’s not ‘Deathless.””
Deathless is filled with emotion and raw metal musical talent that truly stand for what is to come of Miss May I and its members Benton, Justin Aufdemkampe (guitar), BJ Stead (guitar), Ryan Neff (bass/vocals) and Jerod Boyd (drums).
“I think it taught us that we wanted to really change it up for the crowd, because I think we were going on this trend that everyone is going on and I feel that people were trying to predict what the next record was going to sound like,” Benton said. “Then, with what we were going through, we just thought, ‘Screw it, if we’re going to do this, let’s do something weird, crazy, outside of the box. Let’s just write something old school and heavy like we used to be, because no one will expect that.’ That’s what everyone’s missing right now, that’s what we felt in the metal world. I think we wouldn’t have had that courage if we weren’t in such a bad place.”
Their tour is bound to be filled with a whole bunch of new — songs, attitude and other surprises to be left up to the band.
“I think we’re just going to go really heavy for that tour,” Benton said. “We have a lot of cool surprises for the tour. We want to show people that is really where we are heading for the future, records like Deathless.”