The way Cameron Picton tells it, as his time came to an end playing bass and sharing lead vocals in Black Midi, he was exhausted from being part of a successful band and skeptical of starting a new one; he was finding fresh inspiration in the singer-songwriter music that spoke to him as a teenager but feeling boxed in by the aesthetic limitations of the genre. He started writing songs whose lyrics approached complex, intertwining narratives from multiple perspectives, but he was resistant to telling linear stories or writing in character. He was burnt out and fired up, embracing a future of endless possibility through a merciless process of elimination.
The songs on My New Band Believe, the 26 year old’s self-titled debut after the dissolution of Black Midi, are long and complicated and stubbornly resistant to interpretation. Alongside a traditional artist bio, Picton chose to publish a “numerological analysis” of the record that recounts, among other things, the number of days it took to record (29), the studios where he worked (11), the collaborators involved (22 musicians, 21 singers, 9 engineers) and their age range (oldest, 66; youngest, 21). Beyond Picton himself, there are no consistent members of the group. At any given live performance, he may be accompanied by a completely different set of musicians, and of the three pre-release singles, only one appears on the actual album.
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All these statistics, in the spirit of Picton’s evolving self-mythology, are a way of obscuring the simple fact that he is one of the most crucial voices in indie rock today. There’s no way that Black Midi would have been as influential or attention-grabbing without the snarling, authoritative delivery of frontman Geordie Greep, a confrontational style he extended on his imaginative solo debut, 2024’s The New Sound. As his foil, Picton provided two songs per album, and if you go back and revisit them, you will hear an artist steadily testing the membrane, mutating the band’s zany, tormented post-punk into something more textural and serene (“Diamond Stuff”) or outright terrifying (“Eat Men Eat”).
On My New Band Believe, Picton challenges himself to incorporate these idiosyncrasies into more subdued material. His voice is a thin wisp of smoke, more conventionally melodic than his contemporaries in the Windmill scene but still employed for the same devious ends. In the extraordinarily composed “Actress,” he assesses the weight of achieving your dreams—“Become a famous actress/’Cause that’s what got you through this”—using loose symbolism of fire and dragons that makes it sound a bit like a nightmare. In the concise tease of an opener, “Target Practice,” he delivers a taunting folktale about generational anger and revenge that’s all the more haunting for what he doesn’t reveal.
It’s only two minutes, but “Target Practice” helps illustrate the enormous ambition of this music. There’s an intricate string arrangement swooping beneath his falsetto; there’s a delicate pronunciation of the word “cry” that suggests a history of late-night heartbreak in the company of Jessica Pratt; there’s a climactic choir entrance that affirms this artist was at a formative age when “Ultralight Beam” dropped. His punk background will always guide him toward controlled chaos and lurching, twitching rhythms, but here he takes unabashed leaps toward elegance and musical settings that suggest formal attire. Delivered with strings and horns, whispered vocals and flamenco-inspired nylon-string guitar, it is music that encourages us to become as obsessive as Picton was while assembling it.
