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Three summers ago, black midi flew to Asia for a tour of Mongolia, South Korea, Japan, and China. The final stop was in Xi\u2019an, and the lads, more than a few beers deep, helped themselves to a delicious 3 a.m. crayfish boil. \u201cWhat did you do last night?\u201d the band\u2019s promoters asked them the next morning. \u201cOh, we went and ate crayfish on the street,\u201d bassist Cameron Picton said. \u201cOh, man,\u201d someone replied, \u201ccrayfish is so dirty. You\u2019re gonna get sick.\u201d 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. \u201cYou got to suffer to have nice things,\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n A year after Xi\u2019an street crustaceans polluted Picton\u2019s gut, black midi called it quits, on account of \u201ctouring too much\u201d and, I\u2019m sure, a few other still-undisclosed reasons. During an Instagram live, frontman Geordie Greep lamented \u201cblack midi was an interesting band that\u2019s indefinitely over.\u201d Picton himself posted on X, revealing that he, Greep, and drummer Morgan Simpson had \u201cagreed to not say anything about \u2018breaking up\u2019 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.\u201d While doing press rounds for his solo debut, <\/span>The New Sound, <\/span><\/i>Greep confirmed to <\/span>NME <\/span><\/i>that the trio wasn\u2019t on speaking terms.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Of course, when black midi split, all eyes naturally looked to Greep. I won\u2019t knock Greep\u2019s bag\u2014his debut did splashy, head-spinning things and tugged at threads of Laura Nyro, AC\/DC, H\u00e9ctor Lavoe, Walter Hawkins, Oneohtrix Point Never, and so on\u2014but I\u2019ve always been more endeared to Picton, who flew under the radar despite lending great leads to \u201cSpeedway,\u201d \u201cNeart DT, MI,\u201d \u201cSlow,\u201d and the ecstatic \u201cEat Men Eat\u201d \/ \u201cStill\u201d double-feature. While <\/span>The New Sound <\/span><\/i>caught all the fuss in 2024, I figured Picton would come up with something brilliant on his own eventually. As it turns out,\u00a0 \u201ceventually\u201d ended up being February 2025, when Picton\u2019s new outfit My New Band Believe showed up with a non-album single, \u201cLecture 25,\u201d a semi-adaptation of Dennis Cooper\u2019s \u201cLecture 1970\u201d poem. It sounded, to my ears, on brand with (or at least tangential to) Picton\u2019s black midi contributions: Sondheim melodies, prog complexities, righteous vocal pull-aparts, disaffected prose decorated in posh orchestration.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I want anything and everything that sounds like the second My New Band Believe single, \u201cNumerology\u201d\u2014all 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 \u201cNumerology\u201d to finish. Picton gives us Milton Nascimento, Dan Bejar, Blockheads, David Byrne, and the Velvet Underground all in one go. There\u2019s a tinge of ELO vocoder in there, as well. <\/span>Actually, there\u2019s so much who, what, when, and how in the track that it\u2019s hard not to hallucinate a multiverse of influence inside of it. \u201cNumerology\u201d is a funny name for this song because its contrasts are practically unquantifiable. All we can do is untangle Picton\u2019s serpentine, skronking, ritzy madness, affix some references to his rhythms, and blast the thing sky-high.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Speaking of references, I ask Picton if there are any legs to the online accusation that the guitar break in \u201cNumerology\u201d is actually a <\/span>Clube da Esquina <\/span><\/i>sample. He puts a finger over his lips and shushes me. \u201cI can\u2019t say. It\u2019s <\/span>technically<\/span><\/i> credited to me,\u201d he quips, smirking, before alluding to, presumably, the late L\u00f4 Borges. \u201cTo clear that with someone who\u2019s recently passed away is a bit difficult.\u201d At the end of black midi, Picton started reading Gary Indiana and Dennis Cooper\u2019s books. He felt he could \u201c<\/span>see things that they were doing that I hadn\u2019t really been able to articulate myself that I was trying to do in songs.\u201d The impulses he had musically were finally justifiable. \u201cIt was nice to see that other people had done it before in this whole world I had no idea about.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n