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. 

Last March, 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 and performed several acoustic songs, including early versions of what would later appear on this album as “Love Story,” “Opposite Teacher” and “Actress.” 

After two years of replaying my shaky phone recordings from that night in anticipation for more, hearing these studio versions was immensely satisfying. On the stage, Picton commanded the room with the raw, intimate urgency of his voice and guitar alone; in the studio, he and his collaborators have elevated these songs with a production style that beautifully serves their concepts and brings them to their highest potential. 

The opening track “Target Practice” immediately establishes the record’s ambiguous yet consistently intense relationship dynamics, with the speaker repeating “don’t cry, you deserve this” to the addressee they are about to kill. From the very first line — “I’ve got plans that I have to follow through” — we know that this is a story of the inevitable. 

“In the Blink of an Eye” might be the best song on the album. There is richness in every second. Seamlessly transitioning from the opener, it builds in a manic frenzy then bursts into desperation: an attempt to voyage away from oneself, away from what is to come. But we see there is no escape, as even in their departure the speaker can’t look away: “I’m packing a bag and leaving tonight / wherever I go, you’ll be under a watchful eye.” 

“I wish you could kiss me before it’s all too late / But if you’re gonna kick me, babe, at least let me pick the place” embodies the heavy, intertwined nature of love and violence on the record, as does the refrain of “don’t scream / don’t cry.” The speaker’s goodbye cannot be quieted, can only erupt. 

The longest track on the album, “Heart of Darkness,” is an eight-and-a-half-minute journey through one’s spirit while putting the prog in prog-folk. It picks up the immediacy of its predecessor but with a more sinister energy, the rhythm changing rapidly like currents before slowing down with soft harmonies and a menacing riff echoing through the last three minutes. This one takestime to set in, but in its strangeness it carries the emotional weight and pacing of the album. 

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 here. Dealing with the sudden absence of a loverand 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 finding one’s lifelong love. 

Given the context of war and loss in the song, the lyric “Now you’re a river in me / You’re in my bones / I wanna swim to the sea” could be an allusion to the phrase “From the river to the sea,” a call for Palestinian liberation which Picton has been publicly vocal about. This lens agrees with how the song depicts death: quick and casual in a way it shouldn’t be. It is difficult to encompass so many ends of the human condition with one song, and “Love Story” does that. 

“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 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’tchange their ways. 

We get the story in its plainest, least muddied form with the closer “One Night,” a resignation and the answer to the questions of all the songs before: “It was just a cold and awful night.” Quietly returning to the implications of the second track — it’s just one night; it’s just a bad dream. As it quickly ends, we awaken from a dream and slowly realize that was all it was, though we still feel its stakes and see its images flare. 

“Numerology,” released at the same time the album was announced, is not featured on the album but accompanies it as a bonus single on limited edition variants. It makes sense the track wasn’tincluded, not because it isn’t good enough — it’s a masterclass in production — but because it would stand out like a sore thumb on a record that deals with themes of impermanence and death; it’s just too fun. 

Nicknamed “365 Party Boy” when played at live shows, “Numerology” contains the word “ass” 53 times, all in the context of “get your ass on the floor.” With lyrical references like “don’t cry, you deserve it” and the repetition of “one night” in the chorus, the song is inextricably tied to the album despite not being on it. 

The theatrical elements of “My New Band Believe” beg the question: is it ever overproduced? Does the scale of sweeping multi-instrumentation ever 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 can feel 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, backing the existing elements rather than bringing new ones. But more often, it emphasizes the severity and urgency these songs carry. 

I would have loved for it to be longer. But this is an album concerned with feeling, not time: a 37-minute dream can take the shape of 37 hours or 37 years. And Picton wastes no time bringing us into that dream. 

Until the next Cameron Picton project — whether it be under My New Band Believe, a different pseudonym or a new, new band — best believe I’ll be dancing my “ass-ass-ass-ass-ass-ass” off to this one.