My New Band Believe: Cameron Picton On Toying With Expectation
Tuesday, 28 April 2026
Written by Jack Butler-Terry
Photo: Daisy Ayscough / Tomos Ayscough
Cameron Picton does not have his camera on when he dials into our Zoom call, but the chaos surrounding him is palpable. “Sorry if there’s terrible background noise — I’m in a pub,” he says. And, in fairness, anything approaching downtime has been hard to come by of late so he’s right to grab it. Not only has the multi-instrumentalist and former Black Midi member just released his new band’s debut album, but when he speaks to Stereoboard, he does so at the end of a 12-hour media day.
My New Band Believe is Picton’s latest brainchild, a malleable collective that emerged from his desire to release music on his own terms after the volatile dissolution of his former band in 2024. Their self-titled debut album carries a lot of the same genre-bending experimentation that fans have come to expect from Picton’s past output and provides some of the most thrilling twists and turns of 2026.
With Picton as the only constant member, My New Band Believe lives as a rotating collective of improvisers and collaborators, leaving the future of the group open to all possibilities. “It’s an abstract kind of thing,” he says. “It basically is a band that forms and breaks up before and after every gig. It means that it can work in lots of different modes of music-making. I guess it's like trying to play with the expectations of what a band can be.”
Ahead of their first UK tour, we spoke to Picton all about the creation of the group, moving on from past projects, and how My New Band Believe will evolve at all costs.
With Black Midi having has such a dedicated cult following, does that add any pressure to starting a new band, or is it easy to separate the two?
“It’s been nearly three years since the band broke up, and for everyone else, it’ll be nearly two, so I feel very far removed from my time in Black Midi. Obviously, it’s an important part of my life, because it’s basically the entirety of my late adolescence and early 20s. But I think that it’s more personally exciting for me to dive back into this project. And when the band was ending it was always the plan to have a period where I just tried things without it necessarily having to be this big thing.
“I made albums that I called mixtapes and sold as CDs as a way of relieving any possible pressures later on. The mixtapes are cool, and I think they’re interesting, but it’s not music I’ve toiled over, it's just a little fun thing that’s interesting for people that are engaged. It’s not like Pitchfork’s gonna review it and only give it 6.3, and make it so no one’s really interested in what you’re doing.”
On this album, you’ve recorded with Andrew Cheatham, Steve Noble, Caius Williams and Kiran Leonard — they’re mostly listed as improvisers. What does that process look like?
“I think the thing about this album was that the songs themselves were relatively set, and were always reducible to just guitar and voice, which means that there’s a lot of space for good improvisers to play either with or against the structure that’s happening beneath them. I got a lot of joy from doing that.
“Kiran didn’t actually play anything on the record, he arranged strings. But I trust him, and I know he’s an amazing musician, and I didn’t have to give him that much feedback, or at least the feedback I gave wasn’t like, pages and pages of specific notes, it was just, ‘What about this here? What about that here?’
What was foremost in your mind when you were writing these songs?
“When Black Midi was disintegrating, and it became clear that it was not really a workable thing anymore, I still really wanted an outlet to do music and to write songs. I started doing these solo shows at the Windmill in Brixton, at, like, two weeks’ notice or a month’s notice. I wrote lots of songs in this period, this way of having a show and thinking, I need to write a couple of new songs for this. Whether they’re good or not, that’s another question, but just collecting as much material as possible.
“So everything was written with just a show in mind, not necessarily being part of a project. It means that while, stylistically, the songs are diverse, they all carry the same thread of having an interesting guitar part where you can accompany yourself in a way that’s not just strumming. It’s gotta have an interesting melody that you’re happy to perform multiple times, and then also gotta have lyrics that you can perform and convince people with. So that’s the three things. I wasn’t thinking about what it would end up turning into, but that was the momentary motivation behind writing a lot of the songs.”
Some of the lyrics are incredibly dark but presented so joyfully. I’m thinking of Target Practice in particular: “If we see you on spikes with holes for your eyes / we’ll just keep practicing our aim.” What sort of headspace were you in writing something like that compared to Love Story, which is talking about buying onions and cooking dinner?
“I think with Target Practice, I was trying to write about something dark, but trying to make it funny. I think this is a thread in a lot of the songs. Target Practice, I think, definitely leans heavy on the scales of the dark side, but I think you can even read the chorus as a positive thing. There are multiple things going on at once, even if on the surface it’s a dark thing, or a light thing, or whatever.”
You’re about to head out on tour. How are you feeling ahead of that?
“We’ve had a couple of rehearsals, and the musicians are really good, so we’ll see. I like a degree of looseness, and I like it when it develops over the course of a tour. When you go into the beginning of a tour super tight, then the only way, really, is down. I think it’s nice at the beginning of the tour when you have the raucous shows that are quite crazy and not necessarily tight, but the energy’s there. But then you get towards the middle of the tour, and it starts to tighten up. Maybe there’s a bit less energy, but the music is really good and everyone’s really dialled in and focusing on the parts.”
You described My New Band Believe as a band that breaks up and reforms. Does that happen throughout the tour, or is it one lineup for the whole UK leg?
“Oh, yeah, at the moment, we’re gonna move to a tour-by-tour basis. It’s gonna go from a show-by-show basis to a tour-by-tour basis, then to a year-by-year basis, then a decade-by-decade basis, and then probably we’ll all be dead, so…”
My New Band Believe Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Tue April 28 2026 - GLASGOW Flying Duck
Wed April 29 2026 - LEEDS Brudenell Social Club
Thu April 30 2026 - MANCHESTER White Hotel
Sat May 02 2026 - LONDON EartH
Sun May 03 2026 - BRISTOL Rough Trade
Mon May 04 2026 - CAMBRIDGE Unitarian Church
Wed May 06 2026 - OXFORD Common Ground
Mon October 26 2026 - LIVERPOOL District
Wed October 28 2026 - BRIGHTON Brighton Concorde 2
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