After black midi dissolved two years ago like a fever dream you can’t quite piece back together, Geordie Greep wasted no time—The New Sound arrived, brash and fully formed, a man sprinting away from the wreckage. The others receded into the fog. Or so it seemed. Cameron Picton, black midi’s other compositional obsessive, the one who always looked like he was solving a math problem mid-song on the bass, has now surfaced with My New Band Believe, and their self-titled debut is something stranger and quieter and more unsettling than anyone probably expected.
The band is Picton plus a rotating congregation of musicians (22 to be exact) from Caroline, Shame, and Black Country, New Road—groups that themselves feel like transmissions from parallel dimensions of British 2000s music. Together, they make something that barely resembles anything black midi ever touched. Good. We don’t need another band trying to play seventeen time signatures while a man in a suit screams about the stock market.
My New Band Believe is chamber pop architecture built on slightly rotten wood. Mostly acoustic, mostly hushed, Picton’s guitar threading through arrangements of strings, piano, saxophone, harpsichord — instruments that feel like they were found in different rooms of the same crumbling estate. The reference points shimmer in and out: Yes at their most pastoral, Paul Simon if he’d grown up somewhere rainy and vaguely haunted, Black Country, New Road when they still had that unnameable dread running underneath everything.
The album opens with “Target Practice,” a whimsically sinister thing about a relationship that has gone wrong in several directions at once. Strings swoop through it like they’re auditioning for a film. Then “In The Blink of an Eye” arrives — an acoustic arpeggio that curls around itself like smoke, tom rolls echoing from somewhere further back than they should be, the whole thing tilting between near-silence and the brink of something much louder that never quite arrives. The mix behaves like a living organism, expanding and contracting, breathing strangely.
“Heart of Darkness” opens like Steve Howe materialized uninvited in the studio, confident and fingerpicked and golden for three minutes — then collapses entirely into a droning, atonal middle section where strings cry softly and something that sounds unmistakably like kitchen cookware getting stuck in a dishwasher. It is an odd choice I still can’t wrap my head around, but it probably bangs live. “Love Story” smoulders at low heat. “Opposite Teacher” wanders through progressive folk like it lost its car keys. And then “Actress” arrives and the whole orchestral architecture finally commits to a story about fire and dragons, reaching for something grand and earning it.
My New Band Believe is an album that rewards patience — you keep finding rooms you didn’t know were there, and not all of them are entirely comfortable.
