Careening and hallucinatory, it is fitting that My New Band Believe – the shapeshifting collective led by former Black Midi bassist and occasional frontman Cameron Picton – originated in a fever dream. The band’s name was one that lodged in his mind as he battled serious food poisoning while touring China with his former band in August 2023.
READ MORE: Lifeguard’s vital noise-punk won’t play by your rules
From members of the sprawling experimental band caroline to a 50-strong orchestra, the size of My New Band Believe’s cast makes for remarkable sonic diversity. Their self-titled debut album is a mishmash of grand romantic sweeps and fragmented breakdowns, pianos, strings, woodwind, harpsichords and guitars that slam against each other constantly to keep momentum shifting.
This scope is made even broader by the contexts Picton places those musicians in. An unaffectedly beautiful piano line on ‘Love Story’ was improvised in the clock tower of the St. Pancras station in London. On ‘Actress’, the orchestra are packed into a tiny room, and sees all of the string section’s takes, mistakes and all, stacked on top of one another so that they become a teeming wave of noise.
It’s the kind of ambition that could result in a mess. Thankfully, by imposing the limitation that almost everything on the record should be acoustic, with the smallest possible amount of reverb, Picton ensures that the maximalism is tightly controlled. The way it constantly tries to press against those self-inflicted cast-iron boundaries – like the orchestra in that room – is one of the reasons it’s so thrilling.
Then, there is Picton himself, a dazzling instrumentalist. On ‘Heart Of Darkness’ alone, he flits between serpentine finger-picked guitar and blissed-out soul, envisaging a transatlantic communion between English folk great John Renbourn and American soul legend Otis Redding. To longstanding Black Midi fans such chops will come as no surprise. What’s intriguing, though, is how much he shines as sole frontman.
Lyrically, too, there’s brilliance at work, Picton skipping between the perspectives of different characters, drawing out the intense moments of desire, lust, anger, bliss and despair that exist in intimate spaces. Sometimes these emotions dovetail with the music – the gentle domestic portrait on ‘Love Story’ set to strings that border on saccharine; the skittering rhythms that heighten the paranoid self-consciousness on ‘In The Blink of an Eye’ – and sometimes they’re set in uneasy juxtaposition. There is a simmering violence under the quirky surface of ‘Target Practice’, for instance, a meditation on the ethics of assassination.
Like its name that emerged within that 2023 fever dream, My New Band Believe’s debut is an open-ended record, as ambitious as it is ambiguous. In less skilled hands it could easily fall apart under its own weight. In Picton’s, however, it’s a masterpiece.
Details
Record label: Rough Trade
Release date: April 10, 2026
The post My New Band Believe – ‘My New Band Believe’ review: a staggering, sprawling masterpiece from the mind of Cameron Picton appeared first on NME.
