Cameron Picton’s new band is worth believing in

Three summers ago, black midi flew to Asia for a tour of Mongolia, South Korea, Japan, and China. The final stop was in Xi’an, and the lads, more than a few beers deep, helped themselves to a delicious 3 a.m. crayfish boil. “What did you do last night?” the band’s promoters asked them the next morning. “Oh, we went and ate crayfish on the street,” bassist Cameron Picton said. “Oh, man,” someone replied, “crayfish is so dirty. You’re gonna get sick.” 24 hours later, Picton was knocked out by food poisoning in his hotel room. But in between the puke projectiles and full-body shivers, delirium struck Picton. Scattered texts and fragmented colors and pictures flooded his mind. Like some kind of slide puzzle, he rearranged all of it until one phrase shone perfectly through: MY NEW BAND BELIEVE. “You got to suffer to have nice things,” Picton tells me from his cafe seat, pop music falling all around him. He laughs while scanning the room, but I can tell that he means it. 

A year after Xi’an street crustaceans polluted Picton’s gut, black midi called it quits, on account of “touring too much” and, I’m sure, a few other still-undisclosed reasons. During an Instagram live, frontman Geordie Greep lamented “black midi was an interesting band that’s indefinitely over.” Picton himself posted on X, revealing that he, Greep, and drummer Morgan Simpson had “agreed to not say anything about ‘breaking up’ so I was as blindsided as everyone else last night but maybe in a different way. I guess sometimes all you can say is lol.” While doing press rounds for his solo debut, The New Sound, Greep confirmed to NME that the trio wasn’t on speaking terms. 

Of course, when black midi split, all eyes naturally looked to Greep. I won’t knock Greep’s bag—his debut did splashy, head-spinning things and tugged at threads of Laura Nyro, AC/DC, Héctor Lavoe, Walter Hawkins, Oneohtrix Point Never, and so on—but I’ve always been more endeared to Picton, who flew under the radar despite lending great leads to “Speedway,” “Neart DT, MI,” “Slow,” and the ecstatic “Eat Men Eat” / “Still” double-feature. While The New Sound caught all the fuss in 2024, I figured Picton would come up with something brilliant on his own eventually. As it turns out,  “eventually” ended up being February 2025, when Picton’s new outfit My New Band Believe showed up with a non-album single, “Lecture 25,” a semi-adaptation of Dennis Cooper’s “Lecture 1970” poem. It sounded, to my ears, on brand with (or at least tangential to) Picton’s black midi contributions: Sondheim melodies, prog complexities, righteous vocal pull-aparts, disaffected prose decorated in posh orchestration. 

I want anything and everything that sounds like the second My New Band Believe single, “Numerology”—all the MPB, funk, calypso, and free-jazz maximalism included. I want songs touched by transitions as streaky and unpredictable as the ones in the four minutes it takes “Numerology” to finish. Picton gives us Milton Nascimento, Dan Bejar, Blockheads, David Byrne, and the Velvet Underground all in one go. There’s a tinge of ELO vocoder in there, as well. Actually, there’s so much who, what, when, and how in the track that it’s hard not to hallucinate a multiverse of influence inside of it. “Numerology” is a funny name for this song because its contrasts are practically unquantifiable. All we can do is untangle Picton’s serpentine, skronking, ritzy madness, affix some references to his rhythms, and blast the thing sky-high. 

Speaking of references, I ask Picton if there are any legs to the online accusation that the guitar break in “Numerology” is actually a Clube da Esquina sample. He puts a finger over his lips and shushes me. “I can’t say. It’s technically credited to me,” he quips, smirking, before alluding to, presumably, the late Lô Borges. “To clear that with someone who’s recently passed away is a bit difficult.” At the end of black midi, Picton started reading Gary Indiana and Dennis Cooper’s books. He felt he could “see things that they were doing that I hadn’t really been able to articulate myself that I was trying to do in songs.” The impulses he had musically were finally justifiable. “It was nice to see that other people had done it before in this whole world I had no idea about.” 

AFTER BLACK MIDI, PICTON IMAGINED doing a Jim O’Rourke thing, going from being a puzzle piece in his own band to a puzzle piece in someone else’s, but it didn’t work out. Initially, Picton brought a batch of his own songs to an existing band. The seed for the idea was planted by Black Country, New Road in 2024, when Picton, under the name Camera Picture (one of numerous aliases he used to book short-notice gigs at The Windmill in Brixton), was opening for the sextet in the U.K. and selling a 44m50s mixtape of field recordings and ambient pop. It also featured the earliest iteration of My New Band Believe opener “Target Practice,” a “Luigi Mangione at the cabaret”-type tune, as it’s been described. Picton didn’t want to start a new band, nor did he want to do a solo album. BCNR suggested he do neither and just “slot in with another group and be the lead singer for one album.” 

He was going to do that with avant-folk octet caroline, but getting all eight members in a room proved difficult. “They earn their eight members,” Picton laughs, “but I don’t think there are many bands in London that could do with an extra member.” I ask him what the sweet spot for membership is these days. “I think three or four is good. There’s not that many three-pieces around.” All that’s missing is a big wink. Picton met a lot of musicians on the road but never got to make music with any of them. That’s why the earliest iteration of My New Band Believe, he says, was just an excuse to “get my friends in and say, ‘Look, just come and see what happens with this.’” That trickled into the live format of My New Band Believe, too. Rather than starting a formal group right away, Picton invited people to do one gig or one song. “You can have quite a powerful experience by doing that.” 

None of the people who played on “Lecture 25” and “Numerology,” except for tenor saxophonist George Johnson, play on My New Band Believe. Knats percussionist King David Ike-Elechi completed a session but Picton later scrapped the song. The 40ish players who do appear on the album—namely Kiran Leonard, Caius Williams, Steve Noble, Andrew Cheetham, BCNR’s Charlie Wayne, shame’s Josh Finerty, and members of caroline—ended up being “whoever was around.” The songs got recorded on a last-minute, “Oh, shit, let’s do it next week” basis. Working on the fly with whoever’s available is a chaotic mode to create out of, but it can do wonders for adaptability. Picton says it makes him more focused. “You push yourself, even if you’re not necessarily the one playing in the session.” He argues that if you plan out a session for too long, you just end up ticking boxes in the studio. “You don’t feel like you’re getting new ideas, or you don’t feel like you can necessarily digress on anything, because there’s this whole list of things that you need to achieve in that time. Any idea that you have is added to the back of the queue.” My New Band Believe’s engine runs on a singular question asked in different fonts: “Oh, what about this?”  

When black midi was ending and Picton began doing solo shows, he never thought of it as a proper “I’m going solo” pivot, because that’s not what he ever sought out to do. Those gigs were exercises, efforts to pass time after the “total block” of playing in a band had finally tapered off. Picton started booking shows a month in advance and then writing songs that he thought were “good enough to perform, or might benefit from playing live.” Doing those gigs enough and watching them succeed, My New Band Believe developed from the recitals. “I had a fresh slate, I was starting from zero.” When he began to conceptualize the album, Picton looked into past things he’d made, seeing if any of it was worthwhile. The problem was that anything he wrote that wasn’t going to be done with Greep and Simpson got discarded, except for “Heart of Darkness,” which he started by himself during COVID but never thought to do anything with. The song, a “titular and thematic coincidence” with Joseph Conrad’s book, sat in his hard drive until those My New Band Believe shows started cropping up. 

Picton has only been doing My New Band Believe gigs since October. They were supposed to happen last June, but procrastination got the best of him. One of those early performances, a covers-skewed Christmas show, caught attention thanks to clips of Picton leading a bluesy rendition of Cameron Winter’s “Love Takes Miles” appearing online. The following month, My New Band Believe added Neil Young’s “On the Beach” into the setlist, because it “felt right in the context of what we were doing,” and Picton, rebelling against the “three or four different non-standard tunings” scattered throughout My New Band Believe, wanted to pick one tuning and try, as much as possible, to play any song in it while “having the same array of shapes that you do in standard tuning, or as deep an understanding of that tuning as most guitarists have of it.” 

The concerts are described as “workshops”—environments that allow anyone to step in and make music with Picton. He’s working on new material for upcoming gigs, writing simpler one or two-chord songs with minimal key changes. The hope is that they are satisfying to play but easy for an unrehearsed ensemble to pick up, unlike the complicated structures propping up “In the Blink of an Eye,” “Heart of Darkness,” and “Actress.” All of the songs on My New Band Believe were written with solo performances in mind, even though their album iterations feature blown-up arrangements. “It’s interesting, to go from writing something for a solo context, where you’re accompanying yourself, to writing things for a band context,” Picton gestures. “You have to hope that someone’s going to play or push musicians to react to things in the moment.” 

The songs on My New Band Believe took a long time to finesse. When Picton came out of the first recording session, he was alarmed by how unfinished the music felt, despite being satisfied with how it played live. Some of the recordings from that session survived, including “One Night,” “Pearls,” and “Love Story,” but everything else got re-recorded once he decided that “performable” wasn’t good enough. The album ended up almost entirely acoustic, except for a little reverb here and an effect there. The craft, from my vantage, makes My New Band Believe sound fuller, richer; there’s a level of noise present that is more textured and tactile than anything Picton worked on previously. He tells me that acoustic guitar layering is a “little-explored thing,” though he isn’t rejecting the electric guitar. “I had the time to go into the details, overdubbing guitar after guitar after guitar, picking which barre chords should lead, deciding when to go to the resonator, exploring preparations,” he explains. “It’s the kind of thing that you can only really do if you’re sat in your own studio for hours and hours and you are happy to edit for days at a time, which an external producer is not going to want to do, because it’s not possible to get paid enough to do that—not with the budget that this group is working at.” 

MY NEW BAND BELIEVE IS BETTER than all of the black midi albums, and I’d reckon that it’s better than The New Sound, too. There’s something astonishing about Picton’s direction, making pop music that never goes the way you expect it to. He flourishes there, in ideas that are separately maddening but sound completely sane when woven into each other. The nine-minute “Heart of Darkness” is a robust, dry interpretation of transatlantic folk guitar, flipping between folk baroque passages and Southern R&B color. “Target Practice,” like “Numerology,” recalls ELO, this time in the shape of guitar parts transposed into string arrangements. But the maximalism of My New Band Believe is more of a song cycle than some proggy pile-on. Picton even contacted Van Dyke Parks early on about composing the album’s string arrangements, though it never would have worked out, because Parks was “totally out of the budget.” 

But Parks’ Song Cycle is a mountain-mover for Picton, as are the mini-symphonies and multi-movement pop-song interplays on caroline 2. My New Band Believe features only one song with a discernible chorus, and it’s just the band holding a 90-second groove. A saxophone solo pays off an otherwise impassive instrumental. “Actress” never ends properly. The whole project itself concludes on a widescreen bass note. “When you’re working by yourself, or writing the songs by yourself, you don’t really have anyone pushing against you or saying, ‘No, we need to consolidate this into a more normal structure,’” Picton explains. That’s especially true when you’re not thinking about recording, only the live iteration. “I’ll watch a rock band whose songs I’m familiar with, and they’ll play new songs that are more straightforward. Unless you know those songs, you’re not really that interested in them. But when someone’s playing and then cycling through ideas? That’s a lot more interesting, at least for me.” 

My New Band Believe has hits, but in a Bert Jansch sort of way. What I mean is, Picton’s music is also beautiful in an inaccurate way—it’s so much about feel, possibility. Jansch was complimented by John Renbourn’s technically exquisite ear for baroque music on Bert and John. 60 years later, Picton’s counterparts in My New Band Believe fill his verse-chorus pop directions with maximalist spontaneity. They rewire his singer-songwriter traditions using lush, last-minute polyphonies. “Love Story” (not to be confused with black midi’s Taylor Swift cover) is more literal than Shakespearean fantasy, coded as it is in “Chambertin”-style guitar multiplicities. Referencing Jockstrap’s “Sexy 2,” the song lands somewhere between Franz Schubert and Judee Sill, with Picton singing about a lover in images of meal-prep, Asics sneakers, and favorite tunes. As a 12-piece backing files behind him, he delivers his “now you’re a river in me, you’re in my bones, I wanna swim to the sea” lines brightly. “Love Story” is maximalist and pure-fire yet never overcomplicated, touched by sedated piano, orchestral cut-ins, squeaky string bends, and an excellently spotlit bass clarinet part. Picton’s vibrato when he sings “I’m feeling sexy tonighhhhhht” sounds like it’s coming from a popstar who can’t get enough of Paris 1919. 

When I interviewed black midi four years ago, Geordie Greep complimented Picton’s writing on “Still,” suggesting that it was a necessary foil to the band’s mostly gruesome narratives. “The love songs I’ve written, whenever it is, it’s in a horrible way,” Greep said. “It’s not a wholesome romance. The main thing is it’s a whole emotion that is at the epicenter of life, isn’t it? So it’s naive to completely ignore it.” Picton is again toying with romance as a counterpoint to heavier topics, like parenthood (“Opposite Teacher”) or fame and self-destruction (“Actress”). Perspective shifts in “In the Blink of an Eye” add a surreal intensity to the song. Picton sings madly of a violent hookup in “One Night,” My New Band Believe’s companion to the hungry fantasy of “Numerology.” But cynicism, grief, and anxiety are all lyrical ideas that Picton has been picking at since “Speedway.” They’re stories he conveys well, regaled by messy, incomplete characters. His new songs aren’t just dialogues between two people, but Picton’s interpretations of somebody else’s words. He calls it a “recital of a conversation” that blurs the source and tilts the delivery. You never know who is saying what—like how, in “Actress,” insults are being hurled but the intention behind them is obscured. One thing gets said and the next line rejects it. 

Anytime there was a break in touring during the last seven or so years, Picton would return to his guitar, the first instrument he learned to play. Despite being the band’s bassist, he never actually practiced bass when black midi was going. Concerts were his rehearsals, he says, because the bass was never something he intended to master. The presence of Picton’s guitar playing grew on the two songs he contributed to each black midi album. Schlagenheim began simply, with him only playing Gretch White Falcon and Eastwood Sidejack basses on “Speedway” and “Near DT, MI.” On Cavalcade, he played a Fender Jazzmaster on “Slow” and his Rickenbacker 4003 bass on “Diamond Stuff.” By the time he wrote and recorded “Eat Men Eat” and “Still” for Hellfire, Picton was strapped to a bevy of guitars, including an España flamenco, Larry James 56 baritone, National Archtop acoustic, Gibson SG, resonator, and Guild M-120. “It was this thing that I ended up wanting to have my songs led more by my own guitar playing as time went on,” Picton says. “It felt very natural to carry on into My New Band Believe.” His guitar playing has a confidence that mirrors his singing ability. On My New Band Believe, he’s adopted a voice that is imperfect yet intimate and full of drama. “That was a big thing on the record in general,” he admits, “where I was happy to leave certain mistakes in.” Picton was more interested in preserving the performance than capturing some perfect technical miracle. 

My New Band Believe may have challenged Picton as an arranger, but it also proved him to be a hysterical, weird, maximal, and fascinating dictator. The next record he puts out under this name might not feature him singing at all, if that’s what the music shows itself to be. Ambiguity, I suppose, is a throughline Picton enjoys chasing. There’s no telling who is playing these songs, which character is speaking in them, where their vastness will send us, or which of the 11 studios across 10 London postal codes they were recorded at. Regeneration, too, is a hallmark. The music is a time warp, sometimes played at ramshackle shows with bandmates plucked from the street. 

Picton’s world turns upside down on My New Band Believe, a folk record that doesn’t lean into Europe’s current folk revival-revival—progressive, avant-garde, or traditional. The songs don’t copy the bleak experimentalism of Shovel Dance Collective, nor do they adhere to the trad-punk divilment of the Mary Wallopers. Picton set two rules for his debut album: no electric instruments and no black midi players. As he noted in the press materials, both rules get broken mere seconds into song one. The rest of the album, however, is equally disobedient, bursting with ambition and strange, slanted, finger-plucked folktales. I can’t articulate yet what it means to sit with songs like these, songs that occupy whole worlds I had no idea about. Here’s hoping there’s a Dennis Cooper book out there to help me figure out the words.  

My New Band Believe is out April 10 on Rough Trade.

Matt Mitchell is the editor of Paste. They live in Los Angeles.