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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.
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 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. 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.
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.
