By Skye Anderson, Lifestyles editor

By the time black midi’s breakup was announced in 2024, bassist Cameron Picton had already been working on solo projects. Between 2024 and 2025, he released three CD exclusives on Bandcamp and played a string of shows opening for Black Country, New Road under the alias Camera Picture. 

In March 2025, Picton announced his new, more collaborative project My New Band Believe and released the single “Lecture 25,” a chaotic and sprawling guitar track with lyrics pulled from Dennis Cooper’s poem “Lecture, 1970.” 

Now he has emerged as a baroque folk singer-songwriter on a record with intimately emotional storytelling, gorgeous orchestral arrangements and stakes higher than ever. 

It would be a mistake to leap into My New Band Believe’s self-titled debut hoping for a continuation of black midi’s prog rock or Black Country, New Road’s post-punk — though we see several of the same players, Picton has made it clear he is straying from that style. 

Fans who have been following Picton’s solo journey in the past few years have seen this genre shift. I was lucky enough to attend Black Country, New Road’s Nashville show in April 2024 at which Picton opened for them as Camera Picture and performed several acoustic songs, including early versions of the ones that would later appear on this album as “Love Story,” “Opposite Teacher” and “Actress.” 

After hanging onto every word of these live recordings for two years, hearing their studio versions was nothing short of euphoric for me. Picton has taken his songs in a direction that beautifully serves their concepts and brings them to their highest potential. 

“In the Blink of an Eye” might be the best song on the album. Seamlessly transitioning from the opening track, it builds in a frenzy of paranoia and mania before a grand burst of desperation. The instrumentals under the “Don’t scream / Don’t cry” refrain perfectly evoke the feeling of a goodbye. 

The longest track on the album, “Heart of Darkness,” is an eight-and-a-half-minute journey through one’s spirit and rumination on leaving. The first half takes inspiration from traditional folk before turning into something more experimental, slowing down with soft harmonies. 

I immediately fell in love with “Love Story” upon hearing Picton’s acoustic version two years ago — on my recording of the set, I can hear myself squeal at the interpolation of Jockstrap’s “Sexy 2.”It takes a lot for a traditional love song to move me, and the tender guitar paired with lyrics depicting the beauty in the mundane do just the job. Dealing with the sudden absence of a lover and an implied war (“a metal spike from the sky”), the track feels especially reminiscent of Joanna Newsom’s lush, similarly produced 2015 record “Divers.” Both albums take the form of baroque folk and navigate the awareness of mortality that comes with being in love. 

“Now you’re a river in me / You’re in my bones / I wanna swim to the sea” is an incredibly poignant moment in the album. Given the context of war and loss in the song, this lyric could beinterpreted alongside the phrase “From the river to the sea,” a call for Palestinian liberation which Picton has been publicly vocal about. 

“Actress” details a falling out as the speaker addresses someone so focused on themself and so entangled in a desire for fame that they betray the speaker, “breathing fire” in a cycle that inevitably hurts them both. Picton greatly utilizes wordplay here, with “I don’t believe your story / But I might believe another round” later becoming “I don’t believe you’re sorry / This time I’ll need 400 pounds,” and the powerfully repeated line “I know you will” working as a double entendre that can be heard as “I know you well.” After all that has happened, the speaker knows that this person won’t change their ways. 

The theatrical elements of “My New Band Believe” beg the question: is it overproduced? Does the scale of sweeping multi-instrumentation become so much that it takes from the rawness of these compositions? An argument can be made either way. Personally, I’m a sucker for maximalist orchestral arrangements, and my familiarity with several of these songs in their raw form made it more rewarding hearing them completed to the full capacity of Picton’s vision. 

Sometimes it feels as though the album’s short runtime and lack of a grounded subject matter make its grandiosity unearned. Sometimes — albeit very few times —it feels as though the orchestration is there just to be there, like a sitcom laugh track, rather than bringing anything new to the production. But more often, it emphasizes the severity and urgency these songs carry. 

After years of waiting, I can say with certainty that this debut was everything I hoped it would be. Until the next “My New Band Believe” project, I’ll be dancing to “Numerology” and belting “In the Blink of an Eye” in my car.