My New Band Believe

Cameron Picton is still three years away from the age of 30, but he has already been in or founded two of the most intriguing and imaginative rock acts of the century: Black Midi and his new band, My New Band Believe. Black Midi emerged a decade ago from London’s vaunted Windmill scene, then evolved rapidly; between 2019 and 2022, they issued three albums that found dazzling new ways to tunnel through songs and sagas, using prog and jazz and folk to shape self-contained worlds of characters. But in the summer of 2024, the band gobsmacked its growing global fanbase by announcing it was going on indefinite hiatus, that its brief and brilliant journey had ended. Before the year was over, Picton, working under the hilarious alias Camera Picture, began releasing mix CDs of inchoate ideas and experiments, like someone trying to tease out a new way of moving.

But there has been nothing hesitant or half-formed about My New Band Believe, which Picton debuted in March 2025 with “Lecture 25,” a jittery adaptation of a Dennis Cooper poem about embracing youth and rejecting anything other than restlessness. And “Numerology,” which followed nearly a year later, was an acoustic dance track about signs, sex, and escape. Neither of those singles, though, made it to My New Band Believe’s self-titled LP, a brilliantly designed escapade through what first scans as orchestral folk but steadily reveals itself as an acoustic mix of post-punk and freak-folk, absorbing textural abstraction and surprising torch songs. With the great caroline serving as his backing band, Picton quotes Jockstrap as he mourns genocide in a love song, crosshatches Destroyer and Jim O’Rourke in a song about suspicion and betrayal, and somehow finds a path from The Incredible String Band to Motown in an eight-minute opus. Picton is one of the most audacious and wide-eyed songwriters and bandleaders working right now, his music radiating senses of absolute pursuit and possibility.