As the bassist and sometime frontman of black midi, Cameron Picton and his bandmates practiced an explosive form of musical world-building, weaving complex storytelling through thrilling passages of controlled chaos. When the group called it quits in 2023, the artist didn’t immediately feel like making a solo record or jumping back into another band. It was from this position of a not-quite team player, not-quite bandleader that Picton entered the studio and the seeds of My New Band Believe gradually began to emerge. The moniker serves as an open invitation, a subtle nod that if a listener is willing to meet the music on its own terms, they’ll be rewarded for taking a flying leap into the dark. The group’s self-titled debut is a massive and hallucinatory record. It is a collection of music that swerves through wildly different emotional and thematic registers, all the while unraveling an endlessly compelling thread of dream logic. Picton is an unreliable but charismatic narrator, and together with an all-star cast including 7 members of caroline, Kiran Leonard, Caius Williams, Steve Noble, he guides the listener through a rapidly unfolding multi-verse of the band’s making. The record is almost entirely acoustic, using the barest amount of reverb and electronic effects possible. It would be a mistake to assume these light touches mean that their music is any less maximal. Picton leads his band so that each track forms, scatters and re-groups, so that the uplift of one song crashes head-long into the rush of another. Inspired by Bert Jansch’s hypnotic, hard-driving guitar and Judee Sill’s panoramic pop, My New Band Believe is both all-encompassing and constantly in flux.