The collaborative craft of My New Band Believe

From the outside, it seemed like the band wasn’t experiencing any sort of creative rut. If anything, they were constantly evolving and improving from Schlagenheim to Cavalcade to Hellfire, growing bolder and more wild with their song compositions and lyrical narratives, ending on what essentially felt like a novel-in-flash set to brutal prog that pulled heavily from vaudeville of all things. I remember thinking how difficult it would be to follow up a record like 2022’s Hellfire and how interesting it would be to see what they did next. The following year in August, bandmate Geordie Greep took to Instagram Live to announce the split. While Picton implies this perhaps wasn’t as sudden as it seemed from the outside - he does describe the break-up as a ‘process’ - and implies that he felt at least momentarily adrift before starting his new project, My New Band Believe.

“I had a strong desire to be working and it wasn’t possible,” says Picton. “So I started doing these solo shows, and I pretty much discarded any idea that I’d had with, or considered for, black midi and started fresh.” At the same time, Picton had little to no interest in being a solo musician, but he also had a reluctance to start a new band in the wake of black midi’s dissolution. “When it was time to more seriously consider what I would do moving forward, I - probably for obvious reasons - didn’t want to start a new band, and I also didn’t want to do a traditional kind of solo career, if at all,” Picton admits. “I know I was doing the solo shows, but that didn’t feel like something that had any sort of life beyond the moment that I was doing it. And so once the band finished touring, I had the opportunity to play with Black Country, New Road.”

During the April leg of a 2024 US support tour with BC, NR, he sold his first recorded material since black midi - a mixtape CD simply titled 44m50s, for its runtime, under the name Camera Picture. Ideas from Picton’s early solo mixtapes find their way onto My New Band Believe’s debut album, like an early version of “Target Practice” tucked away on that first mixtape. This was a few months before former bandmate Georgie Greep would release “Holy, Holy,” and though there was no real marketing push behind the CD as it served up more a petri dish of ideas than a typical album, it was also the first real indication of what would come after black midi. Picton’s new material, by comparison, really was a drastic departure.

There were hints in previous material that Picton was an experimental folk head - the propulsive acoustics on the front half of Hellfire’s “Eat Men Eat” feel like an imperfect touchpoint to explain where Picton goes with his work as Camera Picture and now My New Band Believe - but Picton’s pull towards softer sounds, acoustics and ambience, while still working within a similar maximalist framework showed that he had little interest in ‘doing black midi’ by himself. Still, he wanted to make something a little more solid, while skirting the line between being a solo performer and starting a ‘real’ band.

“I’d been speaking to a couple of the guys from caroline about doing a collaborative record with them, with my songs,” says Picton. “So working with them in an individual capacity, but with them as a backing band. There were lots of factors into why I went to them. There’s no obvious front man in the group. There’s no obvious lead singer. So it felt like it wouldn’t be disruptive in any way to come in and say, ‘I would like to do this’.”

And so on record, or at least this record, My New Band Believe is Cameron Picton + caroline, right now, for the most part, in a sort of Neil Young + Crazy Horse way, though other players - Kiran Leonard and shame’s Josh Finerty, among others - also make notable contributions. Though it still feels more nebulous than even that implies. For the live 2025 sets at Horse Hospital, his effective ‘playing out’ band featured both Knats’ King David Ike-Elechi and longtime vet Steve Noble on drums, with Caius Williams on bass, and the band leaning more punk in performance. As we speak, even though Picton does call the project a band, he seems unsure of what My New Band Believe really is, and that seems to be part of the fun.

When asked about the band name, which feels like a bit of a cheeky joke considering you can’t truly be a ‘new band’ forever, Picton replies: “I think the band name is very literal, and the way that the band has been operating makes the band name make a lot of sense. A lot of the making of the record, and the development of the record as an idea, and the way the band’s running, [it] relies on things to be done in the moment. So, yeah, there’s no meticulously detailed plan for the long term future of the band. But that’s more exciting, right?”

Last year, My New Band Believe released their first single, “Lecture 25” and earlier this year, “Numerology.” Neither appear on the new album, though “Numerology” has been packed into a deluxe version as a separate physical single. It’s both connected and not to what the debut album, My New Band Believe, is, lyrically referencing “Target Practice” but not quite fitting the record overall.

“It’s more immediately exciting to listen to,” Picton explains. “And the album, I think, is obviously exciting to listen to as a whole. But the song is not on the album because it’s a dance track. It just didn’t fit and I didn’t try and record it for the album. It was done after the album was finished, and it felt really strong. Sometimes when you have something you’ve done in-between finishing an album and or finishing a record, it can get cut in a sort of limbo. So I think it was good to make it the lead single, and I think it suggests a lot about what the album sounds like without actually sounding much like the album at all. There’s lots of connections and similarities. There’s thematic connections in the lyrics, and it’s also just a much more immediate song. So it felt natural for that to be the lead single, even if it’s not on the album, right? People are welcome to make a playlist.”

This explanation largely makes sense. While the songs on My New Band Believe often possess a certain, manic dreamlike energy, it’s a record far more driven by soundscapes than grooves, moving on rather than locking in. It’s closer to a ‘normal’ rock album than the Camera Picture mixtapes and Picton’s affinities for pop are not absent here, but “Target Practice” and ‘true’ lead single “Love Story” are the closest to this idea as it’s typically understood. “Heart of Darkness,” the album’s longest and possibly most ambitious track, is described as something of a song cycle in the Van Dyke Parks tradition, while also referring to Pentangle and Fairport Convention as more broad influences.

“The idea was for it to be this semi-interpolated John Renbourn thing for each section, and then the verses would be like Otis Redding, or something like that,” says Picton. “And then have this Transatlantic sound, where the verse is American and the chorus, if you can call it that, is English. And actually, the song is not totally through-composed. There are a couple of quite different sections, namely the little bridge section, where the chords change, and it drones on the D and then also that little riff. But then everything else has some kind of connection to either the A or the B section, and it’s some kind of development on that.”

Narratively, My New Band Believe also feels like a rather stark departure from Hellfire and the storytelling conceits of black midi as a whole. While that album had tons of named characters - Sun Tzu, Sun Sugar, Tristan Bongo, Radio Rahim, Freddie Frost, and a whole lot of named horses - My New Band Believe leans on a more personal perspective. That’s not to say every line is specifically Picton narrating, but there’s a blurring of the lines that creates a surreal disorientation while still feeling more earnest than wacky satire.

“I don’t think that I’ve ever been interested in the named characters thing,” Picton admits. “I like what happens when you don’t name things. And as far as this record goes, I was keen to have lyrics that were constantly interesting enough for myself to perform and interpret them in different ways. As a singer, I was trying to do things where the songs, in many cases, are a kind of recited conversation, and as there is only one lead singer on the record, you get this interesting thing where the perspective shifts, but there’s no real indication of that.

“There’s also musical examples of that. ‘Target Practice’ is an easy one, because the actual room shifts in terms of where it’s being recorded. The arrangement is completely different from section to section, and the same thing is happening lyrically, where it’s not marked in the same way, or so in such a way that’s obvious or showing itself off.” For some reason, my mind interprets it similarly to a rakugo performance. Picton says something that makes more cultural sense: “Punch and Judy.”

My New Band Believe is rife with these seemingly subtle flourishes that have tons of labor and creativity behind them. Picton kept the album largely acoustic and tinkering after was minimal, so to create tracks that felt big and rich within those restrictions he leaned heavily on layering, with “In the Blink of an Eye” being one of the most notable examples.

“There are multiple tracks of everything,” Picton says. “The guitar is obviously what leads the track. There’s about 20 different guitar layers, and a lot of them are happening at the same time. I took quite a lot of care to do things in certain parts of the song, like align every single transient of the acoustic where it sounds like one guitar. So that’s why it probably sounds minimal but has this kind of feeling of depth and a slightly uncanny feeling.”

But ultimately, it’s how refreshingly tender the new album is that strikes me the most. “Love Story,” while being perhaps the most outwardly delicate song on the record, is still the perfect early representative. Beginning as a simple hushed piano waltz before stumbling into a gorgeous tangle of strings accompanied by Alex McKenzie’s bass clarinet, Picton sings of love - the most simple and universal of song concepts - in a way that I can only describe as charmingly mundane. Cooking food with a partner. He interpolates Jockstrap’s “Sexy 2,” but the balance never tips the song into a joke.

Moments of silliness are present but rarer and add depth to human character rather than play towards absurdity. “It’s how you deliver it and how you put it together. There’s obviously funny things and funny lines in the record, and the band name is funny and all this sort of thing. But there’s obviously a total intention. There’s no cynicism or irony or anything like that. I’m very serious about it.”