On a Friday afternoon, Levi Benton, frontman of rock band Miss May I—rounded out by drummer Jerod Boyd, bassist Ryan Neff, and guitarist Elisha Mullins—is calm and contemplative while discussing the band’s searingly honest new record, No Place For Me, out now via Solid State Records. Across 10 tracks, Benton and company touch on isolation, emotional manipulation, anxiety, and the struggle to find one’s place in the world, best heard on lead single “Sanctuary,” the bouncy “Death Threat,” and “Hand Me A Halo,” a song focused on the feeling of “giving in to feelings of anxiety and exhaustion.”

Zooming in from his home, Benton wears a casual band tee, his dark hair standing out against the background of his room, as he explains how self-reflection, therapy, and an awareness of his own flaws helped the band transform their pain into anthems of understanding and strength.

“My wife said something that sort of hit the nail on the head. She said that this album is about a lot of stuff I can’t talk about, but I can write about it. Also, this album took two years to make, which is a very long time. It’s a really cool bookmark of life.”

Hailing from Troy, Ohio, and emerging in 2007, the quartet have a knack for channeling intrusive thoughts, anxiety, and doubt into powerful anthems. That ability was evident on 2012’s At Heart, which landed the group at No. 32 on the Billboard 200. They followed with 2015’s Deathless, 2017’s Shadows Inside, and 2022’s Curse of Existence, the latter receiving critical acclaim. Along the way, the band have generated hundreds of millions of streams across platforms and toured with acts such as Motionless In White and Parkway Drive. Packed with emotion, raw honesty, and aggression, No Place For Me marries heartfelt rage with the understanding that only adulthood can bring, resulting in some of the band’s strongest work yet.

For Benton, recording No Place For Me was a therapeutic experience, allowing him to articulate “everything he has felt for a very long time, but never had the words for.” Now in his 30s, he has found himself reflecting on his past and questioning what comes next.

“It’s a cliche, mid-life crisis, but I think a mid-life crisis is just being old enough to realize that where everything stems from is just part of a cycle. It hits you like a wave, ‘Oh, I’m like this because of this.’ That’s what the album became about, but we got to write together, and when we listened through the songs again, I got to vent about it, and everyone felt the same way.”

Writing the album together also gave the other members a chance to consider how their own experiences intersected with Benton’s.

“(Some of the others) were like ‘Oh, I’ve been through this stuff’ and that’s how it started. The really cool thing is that it brought out more topics, and that was right off the bat.”

Having played in the band since high school and made eight previous records together, Benton and his bandmates have spent much of their lives alongside one another. On No Place For Me, that shared history gave them an opportunity to reflect on where they have been while asking what they still want to say as a band.

“One thing is the freshness of the new lineup and where we are as a band because things have changed behind the scenes. Nothing has changed much in the past 20 years. That was kind of the statement, that things are different now. The other part is that I didn’t feel this until the last few years, (but) there’s this sort of ‘legacy act’ thing that we’re falling into from being around so long. It puts us in this creative mindset where we’ve accomplished what we’ve wanted to accomplish, and we can’t really upset anyone from here. It’s really funny because ‘Hand Me A Halo’ is the fifth single, and it has really ruffled feathers. There’s more of that on the album. Everyone’s established us as a legacy act; we’ve been around for nearly 20 years, and it was like ‘Let’s just see what we can do.’”

Ultimately, Benton hopes fans will feel less alone in their own struggles and experiences when listening to the record.

“I think that’s the oxymoron, or ironic part, to the title of the album. Everyone feels so isolated and to themselves when they have these feelings, yet everyone goes through these thoughts. The funny thing is, when you’re really going through them, you’re not really alone, but it does feel like you’re lonely. So No Place For Me comes from that feeling of being out of place. In our 30s, we’re like, ‘Why do we feel out of place,’ and then its’ like, ‘THIS is why we feel out of place,’ and we’re dissecting it. That’s what I really dove into on this album.”

No Place For Me is out now. Get it here.