My New Band Believe (the new band from former black midi bassist and sometime frontman Cameron Picton) are happy to share the first track, ‘Love Story’ from the forthcoming album My New Band Believe which will be released through Rough Trade Records on April 10th 2026.
‘Love Story’ is one of the album’s stand-out tracks. The song is, literally, a love story, a couple in their banal element: staying in, going out, cooking, cleaning, dreaming, scheming, until it falls apart in the blink of an eye. The song’s uncomplicated sweetness is suddenly thrown into relief by the spectre of loss.
My New Band Believe – ‘Love Story’ (Official Video)
Drawing on and sometimes directly quoting any love song Picton could think of, ‘Love Story’ was written in just as fleeting a moment in early 2024. “With this whole record, I was trying to make another case for how the modern singer-songwriter album could sound, both in terms of its production and the writing of the songs themselves. I felt some more popular examples of the genre released between 2019-2023 would make the big feel inconsequential and the small nothing at all, so with this I’ve tried to give consequence to the small to make the big feel real”.
The video, directed by Parker Corey (Injury Reserve/By Storm), includes an unused snippet of strings arranged by Kiran Leonard as its coda.
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. 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, he guides the listener through a rapidly unfolding multiverse of the band’s making. With My New Band Believe, he not only comes into his own as a bandleader but arranges conflicting, fragmentary, and hysterical ideas until they form a brilliant new kind of sense.
https://www.youtube.com/@NewBandBelieve
