My New Band Believe

My New Band Believe’s debut album began as a fever dream. Delirious in a Chinese hotel room, Cameron Picton was battling through the worst of a sudden illness when he was overcome by flashes of weird imagery and loose ribbons of scrambled text. The musician would later salvage and shape some of these fragments into songs, but the one that lodged most clearly in his mind was the odd phrase, “My New Band Believe.” When it came time to christen his solo project there was no decision to be made; this unwieldy assemblage of words had to be his signature.

Picton would be the first to admit that he sometimes cringes over the name, sometimes finding it cheesy and earnest, questionably self-aware, not even fully grammatically correct. But in other respects, he’s never doubted its odd brilliance. My New Band Believe works as a reintroduction and a fresh start, both hyping up its author while acknowledging the collective effort that went into its making. It also serves as an open invitation, a subtle nod that if a listener is willing to meet the music on its own terms, they’ll be rewarded for taking a flying leap into the dark.

As the bassist and sometime frontman of black midi, Picton and his bandmates practiced an explosive form of musical world-building, weaving complex story-telling through thrilling passages of controlled chaos. When the group called it quits in 2023, the artist didn’t immediately feel like making a solo record or jumping back into another band. Loose plans to be a rotating collaborator with various London groups à la Jim O’Rourke, including caroline were discussed, even rehearsed, but never fully materialised. It was from this position of a not-quite team player, not-quite bandleader that Picton entered the studio and the seeds of My New Band Believe gradually began to emerge.

The group’s debut is a massive and hallucinatory record. It is a collection of music that swerves through wildly different emotional and thematic registers, all the while unraveling an endlessly compelling thread of dream logic. Picton is an unreliable but charismatic narrator, and together with a cast of all-star players including Kiran Leonard, Caius Williams, Steve Noble, Andrew Cheetham, and indeed, members of caroline, he guides the listener through a rapidly unfolding multi-verse of their own making. With My New Band Believe, he not only comes into his own as a leader but arranges conflicting, fragmentary, and hysterical ideas until they form a brilliant kind of sense.

My New Band Believe is as epic and ritzy as Picton’s previous work in black midi but its sound is fleet-footed rather than scorching. The record is almost entirely acoustic, using the barest amount of reverb and electronic effects possible. It would be a mistake however to assume these light touches mean that their music is any less maximal. The crispness of the sound only helps to emphasize its dynamism. Taking flight off the back of a string quartet layered over themselves countless times, Picton leads his band so that each track forms, scatters and re-groups, so that the uplift of one song crashes head-long into the rush of another. Inspired by Bert Jansch’s hypnotic, hard-driving guitar-playing and Judee Sill’s panoramic pop, My New Band Believe is both all-encompassing and constantly in flux. The build-up of these songs is essential to dramatizing their frenzied emotions. A song like “Actress” weighs a friend’s capacity to self-destruct against the vastness of their dreams, which Picton accompanies with music that lies low until it suddenly soars. “Opposite Teacher” rages against the fate of becoming just like your parents but as the track progressively rises to a fever pitch, it ultimately can’t resist falling back to its cyclical (and familiar) guitar line.

Although the band’s sound is thrillingly self-assured, Picton’s songwriting thrives off of a deep ambiguity. The musician adopts a constantly shifting perspective, giving shape to his narrators’ vivid inner lives. Picton’s characters are searchers who urgently pursue the object of their desire through the twisting alleys and overgrown mazes of his music. “Target Practice” finds him face to face with his mark. The track flips bloody-minded vigilantism into a sing-along anthem, less a murder ballad than Luigi Mangione at the cabaret. It’s a hollow revenge fantasy, where in holding another more powerful person’s life in the cross hairs, his character can feel as if he’s taken back agency of his own.Even when the path is murky and the object that Picton is trailing is more shadowy, Picton bravely pushes forward. The influence of figures like Jansch and John Renbourn are most apparent on “Heart of Darkness” which channels a history of transatlantic interpretation and experimentation to situate his protagonist’s quest in a musical time warp.“One Night” is beautifully, almost painfully open: a Dennis Cooper novel in miniature, where Picton
puts his body on the line for connection, hungry for a kind of intimacy he can’t fully articulate. “You are not the man I took you for” he sings with a suppressed sigh, cycling through violent hook-ups and transient moments of sweetness, holding out for a flicker of intimacy and recognition. 

Picton has a talent for capturing ambient anxiety and a rare gift for distilling it into pop. There’s tremendous truth to the way he paints with overwhelming, mixed emotions. “Love Story” is one of the album’s stand-out tracks. The song captures Picton in his element: staying in, cooking a meal, feeling sexy for his partner, until in a flash it’s suddenly gone. In a moment the song’s uncomplicated sweetness is suddenly thrown into relief by the specter of loss. It would be one thing if My New Band Believe stalled out on present-day terror, but across their debut Picton proves how capable he is at capturing its flipside; people breaking past their fear into something
bigger than themselves. With this record, Picton offers a project that you can believe in.
- Harry Tafoya