My New Band Believe with Threshold

My New Band Believe's debut album began as a fever dream. Delirious in a Chinese hotel room, Cameron Picton was battling through the worst of a sudden illness when he was overcome by flashes of weird imagery and loose ribbons of scrambled text. The musician would later salvage and shape some of these fragments into songs, but the one that lodged most clearly in his mind was the odd phrase, , "rdquo" -> My New Band Believe." When it came time to christen his solo project there was no decision to be made; this unwieldy assemblage of words had to be his signature. Picton would be the first to admit that he sometimes cringes over the name, sometimes finding it cheesy and earnest, questionably self-aware, not even fully grammatically correct. But in other respects, he's never doubted its odd brilliance. My New Band Believe works as a reintroduction and a fresh start, both hyping up its author while acknowledging the collective effort that went into its making. It also 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. As the bassist and sometime frontman of black midi, Picton and his bandmates practiced an explosive form of musical world-building, weaving complex story-telling 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. Loose plans to be a rotating collaborator with various London groups à la Jim O'Rourke, including caroline were discussed, even rehearsed, but never fully materialised. 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 group's 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 a cast of all-star players including Kiran Leonard, Caius Williams, Steve Noble, Andrew Cheetham, and indeed, members of caroline, he guides the listener through a rapidly unfolding multi-verse of their own making. With My New Band Believe, he not only comes into his own as a leader but arranges conflicting, fragmentary, and hysterical ideas until they form a brilliant kind of sense. My New Band Believe is as epic and ritzy as Picton's previous work in black midi but its sound is fleet-footed rather than scorching. The record is almost entirely acoustic, using the barest amount of reverb and electronic effects possible. It would be a mistake however to assume these light touches mean that their music is any less maximal. The crispness of the sound only helps to emphasize its dynamism. Taking flight off the back of a string quartet layered over themselves countless times, 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-playing and Judee Sill's panoramic pop, My New Band Believe is both all-encompassing and constantly in flux.

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