Chemtrails, Echo Guitars, and the Name You Can’t Google
Düsseldorf has a claim on electronic music that goes deeper than Kraftwerk, though Kraftwerk is always where the story begins. May are a three-piece from that same city—Maewa on vocals, Christoph on guitar, Carsten anchoring the production—and their sound sits somewhere between the 1980s and tomorrow. Analog synths, echo guitars, a groove-heavy rhythm section. The reference points aren’t hard to locate: Garbage, Metric, The XX, alt-J. But coordinates only tell you the territory, not what’s actually happening inside it.
What makes May interesting is Maewa’s specific lyrical universe: electromagnetic radiation, contaminated food, chemtrails. Paranoia rendered as pop. Her voice can tip from sharp and unsettling into something sweet with almost no warning, and the tension between those registers is where the band lives. My 1st Sony is their debut record proper, and it sounds like a band that has been waiting longer than it wanted to finally get its music into the world.
They’ve been around since 2013. Maewa’s previous Cologne band dissolved and she went looking for a guitarist, found Christoph, and a mutual contact introduced them to Carsten. A fourth member came and eventually went, and they discovered they worked better as three. The name was a throwaway joke—someone said "My Artificial You" and it collapsed to MAY, and it stuck. Christoph, who spent decades running a large company before walking away to make music full time, admits it was a catastrophic choice for the digital era: unsearchable, permanently buried under results for the former British prime minister. They love it anyway.
The record has a track called "Smear" that Maewa describes as writing itself—finished in twenty-five minutes, which is the kind of creative event that feels embarrassing to admit in interviews but too significant to leave out. Christoph, who worked as a recording engineer in the late 1980s and came away from meeting his musical heroes almost uniformly disillusioned, lists "Smear" and "Bleak" as the album’s strongest moments on paper. Live, he loses himself in "Fortress" and "Alive," their guitar parts elastic enough to stretch into something that no longer quite resembles the studio versions. Carsten, more obliquely, picks "Micropsycho": the ambivalence of the verses, the way they dissolve into a rush, the sensation of a long climb and then the drop.
Inspirations scatter widely. Maewa reads continuously—spirituality, astronomy, Nordic mythology, whatever politics is doing this week—and feeds it all into her lyrics alongside a deep love for science fiction films. Christoph spends hours alone with guitar sounds and effects units, accumulating fragments, some of which might eventually become songs. Carsten incubates ideas slowly, triggered by some small thing, developed over days.
For dream collaborators, Maewa picked Lady Gaga—another Italian-descended artist with an instinct for scale and theatrics. Carsten, with admirable candor, chose will.i.am, mostly because he wanted to understand how to actually make money from music. Christoph, already burned by the studio-with-heroes experience, said he’d settle for talking effect pedals with Russell Lissack from Bloc Party.
There’s something I like about the specific absurdity of May’s personnel: a freelance actress and yoga teacher, a man who ran a company for a quarter-century and left it behind, and a third member who makes it work around a regular job. When asked to describe the band in three words, Maewa said You Love Us.
Christoph said Fucking Great.
Carsten said Electronic Underdog Monsterpuppie.
I think Carsten is closest to the truth.