MY NEW BAND BELIEVE - My New Band Believe

After the breakup of Black Midi, one of the most important bands to emerge from the Windmill scene, plenty of questions were being asked about its now-freed former members. At the same time, it was impossible to expect musicians so brilliant and talented, at the peak of their powers after three such ambitious albums, to simply sit on their hands.

And so, following Geordie Greep's enormous solo debut, “The New Sound”, bassist Cameron Picton also set to work on his own first personal project, his own “new band”.

Picton's project arrives after two preparatory singles, later left off the album for not being stylistically coherent with it, but which already hinted at an overflowing creativity. On “Numerology” (released in February 2026), every single instrument had a life of its own, blending into the huge mass of the others before spontaneously breaking off on its own path — an eclectic track, yet with a rare stylistic solidity, where the overall confusion was actually part of a grand design best seen from a distance.

With the actual first single taken from the album, “Love Story”, we begin to get to the heart of the record; the love story told by Picton is made up of small, ordinary gestures and everyday life, of a sweet, repetitive melody that uses a piano to step onto the stage, and a string orchestra to take over the whole scene.

The theme of everyday life, of the popular narrative, also returns in “Target Practice”, the album's opening track. Even though it offers a melody that almost sounds like a nursery rhyme, the arrangement and instrumentation actually lean towards a formal dressing-up, an elegant outfit that nonetheless wobbles and contracts around the song's key line — and perhaps the key line of the whole album. “Don't cry, you deserve it” departs from the intimacy Cameron draws us into on “Love Story”, and on the record as a whole, while still backing up the emotional cynicism that seeps through the album's moody, lunatic sensations.

Overall, this sense of alternating intimacy acts as an unshakable pillar; an angry narrative in the middle of which, however, the unspoken elements of a relationship are coldly laid out, elements to which the melody can only add hope.

The album's aromatic quality, though, starts to become more intensely felt from “In The Blink Of An Eye” onward, a track that, after three minutes of delicate prog-folk surges blooming out of nowhere and vanishing just as quickly, dissolves into the desperate repetition of the phrase “Non piangere, non urlare” within a lush prog garden, thick with instruments and technique. The stylistic and artistic peak of “My New Band Believe” is reached with “Heart Of Darkness”, a feverish baroque dream with subtle medieval overtones, in which Cameron Picton works to build an organized chaos, steered by his reliable instinct. Irregular dreams, revealing the feelings stirred up by the confused events described in an epic dominated by enchanted, cathartic melodies that wander, unlawfully, between chamber folk and the avant-garde, even brushing lightly against flamenco.

The album's songs thus alternate between delicate moments, where the guitar escorts Cameron's fragile vocals echoing Elliott Smith and Richard Dawson, and denser moments that look to the chamber pop of recent Black Country New Road (perhaps aided by the participation of some of their members in this project), arriving at decidedly bolder, more dynamic sections that, however, as already mentioned, suddenly fizzle out into nothing.

“Pearls” and “Opposite Teacher” are the album's weakest tracks; despite boasting an enviable baroque pop made of guitar progressions and melodies, in the broader context they sound already tried and tested, at times becoming predictable.

“Actress” is a blazing museum of dreams; after an introduction reminiscent of a drowsy morning wake-up in the style of “Lovely Rita”, it stumbles into a symphonic, cinematic pop that lends the melody a character and mood never explored before. A village full of characters, instruments, voices and melodies, through which Picton navigates, shifting mood and sound along the way. Toward the end, the track takes on a theatrical, rhythmically vertical shape, indebted to Black Country's “Live At Bush Hall”.

With “One Night”, an album that shines for its arrangements, performances (featuring, among others, members of Caroline and Shame) and inventiveness comes to a close. A substantial and eccentric debut that plunges the listener into Picton's cynical sentimentalism, forcing us to fall in love with his elegant, maximalist fairy-tale imagination, which seems destined to push ever more knowingly toward the avant-garde.

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02/05/2026