Although he didn’t know it at the time, Cameron Picton started over in a Chinese hotel room. While on tour with his previous band—the anarchic, experimental jazz-rock trio Black Midi—the London-born multi-instrumentalist and songwriter fell into a state of utter delirium after coming down with food poisoning somewhere along the band’s Asian run in August 2023. Sweating through a fever in his hotel room, he reached for his phone.
“I wrote down a bunch of phrases, and a bunch of words strung together. Whatever came to me,” he tells CONE. “When I got better later on, I was looking through those notes. I thought the name, My New Band Believe, kind of worked.”
That phrase eventually became the name of Picton’s new solo project following the abrupt but privately brewing split of Black Midi, which arrived roughly a year after that bout of food poisoning. That’s all well and good, of course, but the name leaves Picton with a conundrum. What happens when My New Band Believe is no longer new? “I mean, the world is very old,” Picton replies. “Everything here right now is new, when you think about it.”
It’s this unique perspective that drives the listening experience of My New Band Believe’s eponymous debut album. Released in April 2026, the eight-track odyssey drifts between indie folk, baroque rock, chamber pop and the unmistakable avant-garde flair that naturally comes with Picton’s musical pedigree. In a way, the record feels like an equal and opposite reaction to his past work. Where Black Midi often sounded like a band pushing itself to the absolute limit at any given moment, My New Band Believe lingers more in the space between those extremes.
“I wasn’t considering any kind of grand arrangement,” says Picton when discussing the songwriting on the album. “All of these songs were written to be performed live with just my guitar and my voice.”
Only later did he begin to think about how the tracks would actually sound on the album. “Once I played the songs a bunch, and got closer and closer to recording them, things seemed to naturally suggest themselves,” says Picton. “Some parts I was really specific about. And then there were bits where it could have gone any kind of way, which led me to trying a bunch of different things out.”
Picton singles out the album’s penultimate track, the eight-minute “Actress.” On the track, it leaps from a clamor of drums to a swell of orchestration, then into finger-picked acoustic playing in the spirit of Django Reinhardt or Nick Drake. Eventually, these three movements collide, guided by Picton’s breathy, intimate vocal delivery.
“There were so many overdubs on that one,” Picton reflects. “We did a lot of tweaking as recording went on. It became quite an edited track. We were trying to work out how to give it the right amount of space, but we also wanted to make it feel really claustrophobic at the right point.”
One of the album’s longest tracks immediately follows one of its shortest, the closing number “One Night.” Nylon-string guitar and tasteful string motifs set the scene, while Picton’s lyricism depicts a singular fling encroaching on romance—and the conflicting emotions therein. “I wasn’t sure about bringing a song like that in,” Picton confesses. “It’s just not the kind of thing that I would usually write. It was actually Mike [O’Malley] and Jasper [Llewellyn], who co-produced the album with me, that really encouraged me. I did this cursory recording of it, and they both got really excited about it.”
Orchestral arrangements shape both songs, either accentuating the intimate, tender moments or pushing the densely-layered passages into a full-scale cacophony. Beyond the string quartet, woodwind instruments like the flugelhorn and the bass clarinet weave through the record. “Unfortunately, we didn’t have the budget for a full orchestra,” says Picton. “We took the musicians that we had and did loads of overdubs, so it ended up sounding like one. That was a really fun couple of days, recording every take and layering them on top of one another.”
Kiran Leonard, a prolific London composer and musician who released his debut album at just 14 years old, handled the arrangements. A fan of his work, Picton knew immediately that Leonard was the right man to bring ornate, unconventional arrangements to the songs.
“I specifically sought him out for this gig. We had great conversations about how all of the songs should sound and feel. We had quite the back and forth about it, and it turned into a really long process along the way. But the more we talked, the more we developed everything into what you end up hearing.”
My New Band Believe is an album that never lets the listener rest. Any sense of security established, even for a moment, collapses into something else entirely. Forty seconds into “Pearls,” a loud beep disrupts the folk-like intimacy it builds. Minutes later, a field recording captures Picton literally leaving the studio. “I kept wanting to put things in to take you out of it. So why not literally take you out of it?” he reasons. “That’s genuinely just me physically taking a microphone—still plugged in, still recording—from the studio out onto the street. It felt like the right way to finish that track.”
Picton isn’t much of a conversationalist at the best of times. He tends to answer in a direct, succinct way—not out of coldness, but because that’s simply his communication style. Given the abrupt nature of their 2024 split, he also avoids talking much about Black Midi.
It feels pertinent, however, to compare and contrast. Some fans will land on this album the same way they did to The New Sound—the 2025 debut album from Picton’s estranged Black Midi bandmate Geordie Greep—expecting something similar to what the band established for themselves across their brief but impactful run, but instead finding something else entirely. Picton knows this, and doesn’t shy away from it either.
“I guess this is a little different to what they’re used to from me. But I think—hopefully, at least—the people that liked Black Midi are open-minded music fans in general,” he responds. “They’re interested in music as a spectrum, rather than a particular sound or aesthetic or genre. I don’t think distinctions like that are important. It’s just the sound of one record, too.”
When asked what he hopes listeners take away from My New Band Believe, Picton doesn’t give an emotional response. Instead, he shifts into audiophile mode. “I want people to listen to it loud, but don’t have the bass too high up,” he says. “Take this album with you wherever you want to go. Listen to it in the park! Listen to it in the sea! Wherever!”
Lead image photo credit: Daisy Ayscough and Tomos Ayscough