George Ward
Freelance journalist and online editor for CLUNK. Can be found out and about in Bristol, finding cheap records or having a pint on King Street.
We chat with Cameron Picton, former black midi vocalist/bassist about his new project ‘My New Band Believe’
After three albums and an impossible number of tours, experimental rock band black midi disbanded in 2024. In the years since, we’ve witnessed its members explore their own careers, with drummer Morgan Simpson featuring on several projects, frontman Geordie Greep releasing his debut solo album ‘The New Sound’ and bassist/vocalist Cameron Picton experimenting with solo gigs.
Now, with My New Band Believe, we get a full project led by Picton and supported by a hugely exciting group of musicians. The record is almost entirely acoustic, with lush string arrangements, flamenco guitar and two tracks longer than 8 minutes. It is a hugely ambitious debut album and combines the romance of Cameron’s more gentle songwriting with the darkly comedic viciousness of his more aggressive work.
Towards the end of black midi, “however long you want to make that,” Cameron Picton began to become dissatisfied. “I found that writing songs for the group was quite frustrating and I was always really unsatisfied with them. With a large number of “half-songs” in the bank, Picton often felt that on these black midi records, he was limited to using only “the two songs that I was happy with that I’d done around then.”
This time around, under the name My New Band Believe, he “found everything a lot easier.” Touring with friends Black Country, New Road after black midi “broke up or took a break or whatever,” Cameron began playing solo acoustically, putting aside songs he’d written for the band and focusing entirely on new material, a lot more his voice, rather than “writing something for two or three or four other people’s approval in in order to get my contribution in the band.”
Though he found this process a lot more satisfying, Picton was at a loss. He wasn’t particularly interested in pursuing a solo career, but he also didn’t want to start a new band. At first, he began “half-talking” about collaborating with London 8-piece caroline but, through him having written a lot of songs himself already and the band focusing their attention on their new album ‘caroline 2,’ it ended up just being him.
“I realised that I knew how I wanted to do the arrangements for all the songs and there was less scope for collaboration within that, especially on the songwriting, which was why I think I initially was keen to approach them.” With this being said, caroline feature on the new record, with members Mike O’Malley and Jasper Llewellyn even making up what Picton considers to be the core creative group, despite the two of them hardly appearing at all on the actual recordings.
Even with 8 new collaborators from caroline, even more kept appearing, and the project began to morph into more of a collective situation, releasing standalone single ‘Lecture 25’ in 2025. Then, in February 2026, Cameron Picton announced the full debut album, self-titled ‘My New Band Believe,’ with yet another standalone single ‘Numerology.’
Announcing a debut album with a single not even on the project is an untraditional move. After finishing work on the album, Picton worked with former black midi member and long-time collaborator Seth Evans, with the aim to release a two-sided song. On the A-Side would be a rock version of a track and on the B-Side, an electronic version. “The new song that came out would be like the rock version of that song, ‘Numerology’. And then there would have been another one, which was like a drum machine version. But obviously, as always happens, the idea changes and I didn’t finish the other track.”
So, as there wasn’t an “obvious lead single” for the album, ‘Numerology’ filled this space. An additional benefit of this choice was keeping the album a surprise for listeners, especially considering the album is only 38 minutes long and contains only 8 songs, the same number as the last black midi record ‘Hellfire’.
“With ‘Hellfire,’ there were only eight songs on that album and we released three singles. Usually, the singles are the best songs on the album, so by the time the album comes out, everyone’s basically just reacting to probably the five worst songs.” Though we’ve now also been treated to the beautifully gentle ‘Love Story,’ it is definitely refreshing for fans to go into the album as blind as possible.
As with his older work, Picton’s songwriting often focuses on characters, as opposed to a more autobiographical style. Opener ‘Target Practice’ is the most vicious lyrically, filled with threats and violence, all underpinned by a hilariously twee instrumental. As opposed to writing fully formed characters, Cameron prefers to keep the narrative contained within the songs.
“I don’t think they’re necessarily fully formed characters. The way I was going about it was imagining an interaction and things stemmed from that, so I wasn’t really thinking about anything other than the things that the two people were saying to each other. One person is dependent on the other person in terms of how they fit into the song.
There’s not really so much of a hierarchy in terms of one person being above the other person or one person getting more of the narration.”
On ‘Love Story,’ Jockstrap fans may notice a little nod to the duo, with the line “I’m feeling sexy tonight, I got my Kikos on, my hair is-“. After writing the bones of the track, Picton realised the melody reminded him of Jockstrap’s ‘Sexy 2’ and, wanting to quote a song after the line “You sing along to your favourite songs…”, felt it was only fitting.
“It’s funny,” Cameron shares, “because I went on tour with Black Country not long after writing that song and it was only at the very end of the tour that Georgia (Ellery) realised that line was her line!”
Some of the influences on the album are to be expected, such as the moments of flamenco guitar that fans have become familiar with in black midi material, especially ‘Eat Men Eat,’ “pretty much directly a flamenco rock song”. With his mother having lived in Spain before he was born and having been exposed to a lot of Spanish music throughout her career as a Spanish teacher, Picton’s fondness for this style isn’t surprising.
What is perhaps surprising is his affinity for electronic music. “I listened to loads of electronic music and made quite a lot of electronic music when I was a teenager and in the early stages of black midi when we were on tour. I’ve always played guitar but I was able to bring a laptop and have immediate access to making music on a plane or in your green room and not disturb anyone else.”
Although ‘My New Band Believe’ is of course an acoustic album, the techniques learnt during making this electronic music proved to be extremely useful, especially in the editing stage, even if Picton himself admits that “all of the electronic music that I did was pretty bad.”
Choosing this acoustic direction was entirely intentional. Having played electric bass and guitar for most of his black midi career (he makes clear he has “not objection to electric guitar as an instrument”), Cameron noted how easy it was to create sustain with these electric instruments, simply by “strumming the chords with a chorus effect and letting them ring out”. Challenging himself, he became fascinated with how to create this sustain acoustically, using strings and other classical instrumentation to help the acoustic guitar fill the space, rather than relying entirely on electric effects.
For now, you can expect a more electric band at his live shows but, eventually for bigger shows “where there’s actual money involved,” Picton is excited to recreate the fully acoustic sound of the album live on stage with a bigger band. The lineup will generally remain consistent, in order to be able to “develop songs with a set group of people”, but he’s not entirely opposed to a little spontaneity: “I’m sure that there’ll be some where it’s like just three random people off the street.”
Debut album ‘My New Band Believe’ is out on 10th April 2026 via Rough Trade Records.
Listen to ‘Love Story’ here:
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