My New Band Believe

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. 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. Already featuring in The Fader, Pitchfork, The Guardian, Clash, Time Out & NME’s ‘Album Of The Year So Far’ lists, My New Band Believe’s eponymous boundary pushing debut album continues to win plaudits. It is a massive and hallucinatory record, 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, he not only comes into his own as a bandleader but arranges conflicting, fragmentary, and hysterical ideas until they form a brilliant new kind of sense. “On the surface former black midi bassist Cameron Picton doesn’t carry over much from his old group to My New Band Believe – a name that apparently appeared to him in a delirious fever dream. MNBB’s self-titled debut replaces skronking prog-noise-punk with tumbling loops of acoustic guitar, swooning strings and pastoral elegance (with help from arty rock octet caroline). Really wrap your ears around My New Band Believe, however, and you’ll discover Picton’s same penchant for meticulously knotty songwriting and epic maximalism.