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.
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.
Like Jim O’Rourke, Picton favors orchestral arrangements that blossom magically from nowhere and disappear just as quickly into analog-hum quiet. And also like O’Rourke, he can sometimes sound like his beautiful music caught him on a bad day, the grumbling passerby in a colorful, Bacharach-ian landscape. He has a way of making violence sound a little romantic (“If you’re gonna kick me, babe, at least let me pick the place”) and intimacy sound alienating (“You can scream all you want/You can leave if you please”). His habit of subtly interpolating pop lyrics (Carly Rae Jepsen in “In the Blink of an Eye”; Jockstrap in “Love Story”) can have you turning his lines over in your head, questioning just how seriously we should take this whole thing. Still, what Picton communicates as a writer is often less interesting than how he contextualizes it, with music that complicates each confession and grounds every momentary flight of fancy.
Because his songs are presented mostly acoustic and unadorned with effects, and because he often frames his writing in first-person soliloquies to an unnamed second person, there is a feeling as you listen to My New Band Believe that Picton is letting you in on something personal. Combined with the epic track lengths, the blend of typical singer-songwriter turns and fourth-wall-breaking asides can recall Dan Bejar circa Destroyer’s Rubies: the sound of a mythmaker consciously leaving clues, someone who’s studied the classics enough to break the rules his own way. Picton’s gift for jazzy, baroque melodies makes the music feel at once timeless—the type of virtuoso sideman album you might get at the peak of the album era in the ’70s—and unburdened by tradition: At times, it sounds like either the most tenderhearted prog album you’ve ever heard or the most fearless, cold-blooded mutation of folk music.
Sometimes, it’s just plain stunning. Coming from a songwriter who seems allergic to anything remotely sentimental, “Love Story” opens on a portrait of domesticity so recognizable it almost plays like a joke: a conversation between committed partners about their very quotidian dinner arrangement. “I’m soaking beans on the side,” he sings to a melody fit for My Fair Lady. “Chopping tomatoes while you wash the rice.” If you didn’t know any better, you might think that’s all the night has in store. But for the third verse, Picton drops the hand of God: a “metal spike” falls from the sky and a “phosphorous light” guides our narrator on a fruitless search for the object of his affection, now departed from this earthly realm. The twinkling backdrop never fades so it’s left to us to determine what exactly we’re witnessing: A brutal act of war interrupting a cherished routine? A madman’s fantasy spiralling into paranoid delusion? A power outage disconnecting his online companion? It’s in expertly plotted moments like these when all the facts peel away and Picton leaves us alone with the feeling: gorgeous and incorruptible. Despite his best efforts, he makes it look simple.
