The first 10-day session took place in December 2024, followed by a second six-day session in February. It was during the latter that May flew in his string arranger, Amy Langley, from London and set her up in his downstairs guest room with a cello to write the string arrangements. For each song, he gave her a synopsis and a sense of what they were looking for from the strings. On the title track, for example, his descriptors were “elevator music, Jetsons, perfect housewife, psychedelic.”
In contrast to the simple chord sequence, he wanted an over-the-top string arrangement that twists and turns, constantly evolving to drive the story forward.
The string recording took place in London, where Langley’s orchestra is based. They used 18 players on West End Girl to achieve a cinematic, romantic, almost musical theater-like effect. May was present for the sessions at Rak Studios, which were engineered by Ben Baptie (Radiohead, Little Simz), who brought with him an RCA 77 and a pair of 44s, which they used to capture the strings.
“We wanted to capture the true performance of the string players while enhancing the storytelling of the album,” says Baptie. “Using the RCAs meant we could bed the strings in more naturally to the tracks, as they had a much more warm, rounded tone and, more importantly, they followed the narrative of the record more closely.”
MIXING IN SOME ANALOG TONE
After stemming sessions from Logic and Ableton into Pro Tools, which May likes for its “rigidity and sense of intentionality,” he returned to London to sit in on the mix with Baptie. Much like the adrenaline-fueled writing and recording process, the goal was to complete mixing in five days, tackling three songs per day.
“The story of the album is so raw that polishing the album too much would’ve destroyed the intensity of the narrative,” Baptie says. “A great producer once said to me, ‘You can EQ out the soul in a song,’ and this absolutely was one of those moments. I had to lean on my experience and trust my instinct fully on this project.”
“Ben’s got a hybrid analog approach,” May adds. “Having made this record so matter of fact and digitally, it really benefited from being fed through a bunch of outboard gear that gave it a bit more integrity.”
The majority of the album was mixed on a Neve Genesys going through Baptie’s mix bus chain of an API 5500, Chandler Limited Curve Bender and Manley Variable Mu. “It gave more life and movement to songs throughout,” says Baptie. “Even when the song was mainly composed of a loop, we could use the console and outboard equipment to develop the harmonic structure. Pushing the board allowed the compression to join up some of the dots in a sonic way that purely mixing in the box may not have done. We’d also use outboard gear on Lily’s vocal and on occasional other important elements. It helped us define those elements within the songs, allowing them to sit more forward.”
West End Girl was completed in five weeks, from writing to mixing. It closed out 2025 on many “best of” lists, positioning May as a first-call producer, yet his attitude toward making records remains simple.
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“It all comes down to flow versus anxiety,” he says. “The difference between good records and bad records is how much anxiety was in the room while making them. The records I’ve been involved with that have come out okay, but not necessarily amazing—and lack that something that people can hook themselves onto—have always contained a level of self-doubt and anxiety, which comes out in the music.
“As a producer, the hardest job is creating a flow in the room,” he concludes. “The music and everything else is a sideshow to that.”
