Album review: May The Muse – No Please, Yes Thank You

There’s something quietly defiant about May The Muse. Désirée Mishoe, the American-German artist behind the name, has spent years in orbit around other people’s projects: collaborating with electronic producer Robot Koch, lending her voice to soundtracks for Dark and Riverdale. But No Please, Yes Thank You, released this past June, marks the moment she steps fully into her own light.

Produced by Justin Hawkins of The Darkness, the album could have leaned into bombast. Hawkins knows how to make records that strut and wail. But here, he exercises unusual restraint. The guitars bite when they need to, the synths shimmer rather than dominate, and the rhythm section—anchored by bass lines that feel both stubborn and seductive—holds everything together without showing off.

The opener, USA, arrives like a slap wrapped in silk. The guitars crackle with static energy, the drums hit harder, and Mishoe’s delivery sharpens into something confrontational. It’s political without being preachy—a reckoning with ideals that doesn’t collapse into self-righteousness. The anger feels earned, personal rather than performed.

Cruel World follows with a pulsing bass line that loops like a mantra, hypnotic and unshakable. Mishoe’s voice hovers in the mix—clear but shadowed, as if she’s singing from just behind a veil. There’s a goth undercurrent here, something that recalls Floodland-era Sisters of Mercy, but she twists it away from despair and toward a kind of melancholic warmth. Lyrically, she resists grand gestures, focusing instead on the small, stubborn acts of emotional honesty that keep us upright in difficult times.

God Damn layers fat analogue synths over a bass line that slinks and prowls, Mishoe’s vocal performance loose and confident, as if she’s finally stopped second-guessing herself. By Diamonds or Pearls, the mood shifts—beauty and tension coexisting without resolution. Wasted softens things further with its radio-ready melancholy, Hawkins slipping in a guitar solo that feels like it wandered in from 1985.

Then Drama pivots again, channelling Stevie Wonder’s late-’70s funk experiments—strings that glide, rhythms that strut, and a playfulness that never tips into pastiche. Mishoe treats genre like texture rather than constraint, and the album keeps moving because of it.

Millions pulses beneath the surface, holding space for ambiguity. By NTYSMITB, you’re deep in the album’s world—one moment in a smoky Berlin basement, the next on a neon-lit American highway. Roses closes things out without tying everything neatly together, which feels truer than any tidy resolution could.

What’s most striking about No Please, Yes Thank You is how complete it feels for a debut. Mishoe has built a world where funk, rock, goth, and introspection illuminate each other. She’s not chasing a sound; she’s constructing a geography of feeling.

Mishoe’s past as a model might inform her compositional instincts—an awareness of angles, light, negative space—but here she’s sculpting sound, not image. No Please, Yes Thank You is a debut album that feels like a significant arrival, showcasing the work of an artist who took the long route and emerged with a clear sense of her identity.