My New Band Believe

My New Band Believe is the London project of Cameron Picton, formerly bassist and co-frontman of black midi. The name surfaced in a Chinese hotel room, where a bout of food poisoning left Picton cycling through scraps of scrambled text until one phrase lodged. After black midi dissolved in 2023, he spent two years assembling the record with a rotating cast of more than twenty collaborators, including Kiran Leonard, Caius Williams, and Steve Noble, tracking across eleven London studios with nine engineers. The self-titled debut, released on Rough Trade in April 2026, swaps black midi's electric scorch for something almost entirely acoustic: string sections, choral swells, and dream-logic narration moving through chamber folk, progressive folk, and baroque pop. Critics met it with something close to universal acclaim, and the live incarnation remains deliberately unfixed, first staged as open "workshop" nights in small London venues where guest players were invited in for a song, a night, or a whole tour.