Cameron Picton’s My New Band Believe is structured like a dream. Years of practice and instinct make some melodies fall into place — recurring guitar riffs first played on stages years ago, lyrics that pull from and pick apart old and catchy phrases, session players hand-picked from previous tours and collaborations, some old production methods he learned from the Black Midi days — but all of it barrels through in sharp, flashy, and almost distorted images conjured up in split seconds. The self-titled record, named after a line the singer-songwriter blurted out in “Lecture 25”, his first-ever single under the new name, is an immediate reaction to a long-stewing thought.

The former Black Midi member-turned-front man finds himself in a thrilling state of flux, both testing to see how ambitious and experimental he can make his new sound without falling too deep into an overthinking spiral. Picton’s band — and now, its self-titled album debut — took a few years to develop, presenting each of the ten songs one will hear in multiple iterations as far back as 2024. Long-time fans of his solo material kept up with the project by attending his live shows across the UK and US, pressing “play” on his genre-bending mixtapes, and flipping through uploaded footage of mixed live sessions, which he’d occasionally post on the internet for free. My New Band Believe, in a way, isn’t very new at all.

But, as Picton explains in an interview with Northern Transmissions, the project still came together very quickly, and it operates a bit like a pirate ship. The band is him and whoever wants to play for a song, a set, a record, a tour. The promotion in New York City is simply playing the vinyl record for anyone who offered their living room before performing a live set at Public Records. The maximalist music he composed for the recorded version still feels immediate, a frantic burst of guitars, lyrics, and strings to expel all his love, frustration, and excitement. In our conversation below, he explores the playfulness of My New Band Believe that has pushed him to be at his most eccentric, creative, and fun.

NT: Before we get into the actual music, I wanted to ask: how’d you come up with the idea to promote My New Band Believe by just showing up at people’s houses and offering to play the album in full?

CP: There was some point while making the album where I was trying to record a piano in someone’s home. Because the budget was obviously slightly tight, I thought that it could be interesting to just go around and see if anyone would be game to let us use a piano in their living room or something. Well, that didn’t really work out…I decided to just press on with the rest of the album and do piano recording properly by using another space.

We talked about doing a listening party, but every bar or venue that has a semi-passable sound system costs about $5 grand or higher. Also, I’ve never, ever been interested in going to any of these listening party things. I just thought maybe it would be cooler to develop the idea from going around to people’s houses and recording piano to going around and see how they would listen to that album on their system and be able to hear how that sounds. I also thought it was a cool proposition that you could hear the entire unreleased album before anyone else heard it at all.

NT: I think it fits the whole world around the album! Because, again from a promotional perspective, you and the band recreated the cover of The Velvet Underground to announce the album, and that’s also a record that is very much one to listen to when you’re sitting on people’s floors and hanging out…If there was anything to that as well.

CP: It’s funny because it was a last-minute decision to use that photo. There wasn’t necessarily a great deal of thought behind it other than it felt like the right thing to do; it was similar to this idea of going around to people’s houses. It’s all predicated upon doing things very last-minute and just rolling with whatever happens: you might go around to someone’s house, and they have an amazing system, everyone’s really friendly, and you have a great time. Or, you also might go to someone’s house, and the system is weird, they’re all quite cagey, or the whole party has a bit of a strange vibe. I think that a lot of the way that I’ve been working recently is committing to something without a great deal of planning and seeing what happens. And that’s what ended up happening with this Velvet Underground thing. We wrangled the people to be the other members of the band quite last-minute, set things up in the living room of someone we knew — also very last-minute, and we’re lucky enough to have an hour or two where no one was in the house so we could shoot it quickly. It’s nice to plan things in advance, for sure, but I’ve also found it to be more satisfying when you just go for something last-minute.

NT: I’ve been following the development of the band for a while, and from my understanding, you’ve been circulating through live and session players, and you also mark a difference between the people who play with you live and those who play with you in the session. So, what is My New Band Believe? Is it a solo project, a structured band, or something outside either category?

CP: It’s kind of a both-and-neither thing, really. Eventually, I would like at least one album to be done as a proper band — where it structurally functions as a band in terms of the nature of the collaboration. With this part of My New Band Believe’s life, just getting it off the ground was easier to do as something that I was very much leading. (But, I’ll admit the whole process of making the album was very collaborative.) The reason I play with a bunch of different players is that it’s something that’s rewarding in and of itself, and that there’s an element of risk to it where you don’t know how well you’re going to play with someone, or how prepared someone’s going to be. Sometimes you get one rehearsal max with people before doing a show; everyone’s usually really busy and in-demand. Hopefully…eventually, it’ll naturally become a more consistent lineup.

But then at the point it does hopefully become a proper band for a period of time, I wouldn’t want it to be this thing that people feel an eternal commitment to, or feel that they’re stuck in. I’d like it to feel more like, ‘Oh, we’re going to do this for this amount of time, and do that later on!’ So, I would say that, while on the surface of things, this album has been worked on as a solo

album, there’s a lot to it that’s not. It’s basically a band that doesn’t really have any set members. Sure, I’m the leader, but I’m not the band leader. On this particular record, I organized everything, put everything together, and know the songs are mine, but in the future, the songs don’t necessarily have to be mine or sung by me. It’s very, extremely open.

NT: You’ve been performing some of these songs for years as acoustic guitar-led pieces. I’ve heard some of them when you played in New York the past two years, and they are wildly different on the record. “Target Practice”, for instance, has a whole baroque flute and violin section. I was wondering how you traced the development of those songs and built them up into the big band sound that has that peculiar and theatrical feel to it.

CP: Coming to do the record, I knew how I wanted all the songs to sound; I especially knew how I wanted all the songs to feel. It was a long process to get there while working with the other musicians, but everything sounds how I expected it would sound or feel. At the early stage, there was just a lot of rewriting of certain things: there were songs I realized I didn’t really play live that much (if at all) or maybe I wasn’t particularly hot on that ended up making the record because of someone else’s contribution. Like, someone did a little solo or something where you’re like, “Actually, this has something to it!” In those moments, you’re able to set aside your issues with the things you’ve done, and you can start to hear what someone else has added, and the song almost changes completely for the better.

With “Target Practice” specifically, I had this idea of switching environments in the song. Each section is treated differently and could be cut from a different recording — the whole song is arranged that way. At one point, there’s a professional studio recording of me playing it solo on guitar. Then I’m playing it in some bedroom somewhere with a phone’s microphone. Then there’s a string quartet version, a fully arranged version, and one with just mini guitars. The end is kind of everything together.

NT: How did you piece the music together in order to give everything this fever dream, collage-like style? What drew you to that piecemeal approach to pulling from different sections, different melodies, or even different songs? I caught onto that method particularly in “Love Story”, mainly because I noticed the effortless incorporation of Jockstrap’s “Sexy 2” line in the middle of the track.

CP: I feel like a lot of the songs are circling around various ideas — or half-ideas sometimes — and trying to work out a little bit of what they are by doing a different song each time and seeing how each thing relates to each other within those songs, and within different contexts that each song presents. A lot of my songs were written from the perspective of both a solo acoustic guitarist and someone who wants a melodically good song that you can perform in a band and has lyrics that you can interpret in a way a singer could that makes them fun to perform. To be honest, my concern — even though obviously so much consideration has been made for the recording of the album — the writing was really done just to perform it live. Maybe if I had written the songs with more consideration of recording them, I would have made the guitar parts simpler, or I would have left a lot more out of the arrangement. I think the guitar parts suggest what the arrangement should be a lot of the time, especially with these songs, whereas, in, for example, the non-album singles, the guitar part is a lot simpler, which then leaves a lot of space for other instruments in the arrangement. I think that’s especially true on “Numerology”, even though the song is led by my guitar: a lot of melodic stuff in it can come from other things.

NT: Speaking of “Numerology” and how that song works: another thing that’s really interesting about your music is the fact that it’s not necessarily acoustic, but it is just a live band. There are no synths or electronic flourishes of sorts. But, “Numerology”, at least in my reading and knowledge of the track initially performed with a drum machine, it’s fully a club track. It has that booming bass, it’s like a very danceable song, and the percussion is at the front of it. But, it is just all rock instruments. How did you transform the instruments in order to fade into whatever genre you want to…and then make a club track?

CP: On the record, there are a few VCV patches and stuff that I’ve used — maybe two total and done with a very specific intention of getting a sound that you couldn’t really get without it that way. In the last verse of “Target “Practice” where it just goes to the guitars, it’s supposed to sound really plasticky, nasty, and fake, so I thought it was appropriate to introduce a synth element.

Overall, I’m very comfortable with playing different acoustic guitars and getting different sounds and characters out of them. I have six or seven acoustic guitars, and they all have a different character. Then, when you play them all at the same time, you can do even more interesting things with the sound. I am very happy to spend hours, and hours, and hours editing things, especially because that’s not something that really could have been done in a band with external producers working on it because that kind of thing is so time-consuming that the producer is just not going to want to do it. Like, a producer a lot of the time is not going to be working on the project for more than what they’re getting paid. Whereas with this, I’m just happy to sit for a day automating one Nashville guitar or something. This means that, with the time that I’m happy to put into it, I can do things that would have been impossible otherwise.

NT: Could you explain a bit further the reason why you wanted to avoid the synthetic elements as much as possible? How do you feel the record and your music in general serve to explore the character of guitar music — especially acoustic guitar music — at a time where a lot of rock and experimental stuff is very electronic-influenced and/or based?

CP: I think that in a roundabout way, the album is very influenced by electronic music, and my process is very influenced by electronic music, as someone who made a lot of electronic music when I was a late teenager. With “Numerology”, there was the initial idea that I had with [co- producer] Seth Evans about making a double A-side single with two songs on it. One would be the rock song, and then obviously — if you were at the 2024 show with Black Country, New Road when “Numerology” was written with a drum machine — one that’s a more straightforward, electronic track. So, you’d have the rock version of “Numerology” and another song on the A-side, and then the dance version of the rock track and the dance version “Numerology” on the B side. But we didn’t have enough time to record the dance version of “Numerology”, that just ended up being what was finished first, basically.

I think I also set a limitation on myself that I just put on in order to go as far as possible with the sound of the acoustic guitars in terms of processing them in the right way to achieve a sound that you could get with a synth — directly referencing a sound and seeing how you can recreate it physically. A lot of work has obviously been done in the synthesizer world of recreating string physics, but I thought it could be cool to go the other direction and try and get synthetic key sounds from physical instruments.

NT: Another thing that I wanted to talk about was the lyrics, and how they also have this full-of-character, almost theatrical, and collage-like textured quality. But, they’re also still straightforward and melodic — much more lyric-al than, for example, a Black Midi song. How did writing them come together with the sound you wanted to achieve with the big band, especially when it comes to creating this maximal world?

CP: When Black Midi was starting out, and I was a teenager, I was really not interested in writing good lyrics at all. I was just slightly naïve about it — well, really naïve — but that was just kind of how it ended up being. As I’ve gotten older and practiced writing to get better, I’ve become much more interested in the lyric as a “thing,” so a lot of the songs are a lot more lyric-forward than maybe ones that I’ve done with Black Midi, where it was not quite an afterthought but definitely the last thing that was done. Here, almost every track was developed with the music and lyrics moving together. The whole way through, in terms of the writing process, I was singing as I was playing the guitar, and everything came out at once. The only one that didn’t work that way was the second track [“In the Blink of an Eye”]; that was done in the Black Midi style where the lyrics were the very last thing that were put on. For the most part, the lyrics and vocals were all done in one, long night, basically.

NT: When you were performing back in 2024 and 2025, a lot of the songs that you would play were instrumental versions of tracks. Sure, “Target Practice”, “Love Story”, “Numerology”, or “Opposite Teacher” were on setlists, but your CD-exclusive demo tapes were a main focus point of the show. Working through the instrumentals in those tapes before writing a record with lyrics, do you think that that necessarily helped form the sound that you wanted to with My New Band Believe?

CP: Yeah, the first one [44m50s] is a bit of a demo tape for the album in a way, even though there’s lots of music on there that I made when I was 17 or 18. Weirdly, I made that to basically claw back money from a really expensive visa for that Black Country tour, and I didn’t really think that anybody would be interested in it beyond that. But, it’s interesting looking back and realizing quite a lot of it ended up forming the basis of the album, whatever. But, there were also things that I was doing on that tour that I initially thought were going to become a part of the album before I ended up passing. For example, that long ambient instrumental track [36m33s]: I recorded it as the second demo tape (or “mixtape”) with the idea of putting a shorter version of that track on the album. But then when I was doing it, I thought, “Well, I’ve done this now. I spent about a day on it, and there’s not much more to do with it.” Also, I was much more interested in doing the lyric-focused tracks than any instrumentals on the record.

NT: In that vein of performing live for years before presenting a studio recording of the album: What was your reason for posting a lot of the concert recordings that you did in, for example, December last year, when you had like a lot of gigs lined up. It became an online archive of sorts, highlighting the development of the songs that went in some wild
directions? Like, there’s a version of “Lecture 25” that’s just completely different from what came out last year. How’d that also come into consolidating the music for My New Band Believe?

CP: I was very well aware of how many people seem to be interested in listening to Black Midi live recordings. It was something that we discussed at various points, actually: to make an archive or at least more seriously consider making multi-track recordings of every live show. There were a lot of obstacles that came about through that, mostly because the band was working at a pretty high level. We’d often play venues knowing that they had the capability of making a multi-track recording — it would’ve been a case of plugging a laptop into the desk, it’s really easily done — but a lot of them would quote, like, $25,000 to do it. So, we didn’t really keep up with it.

But, by the time Black Midi stopped playing smaller venues and this band started playing smaller venues with desks that can make multi-track recordings, I wanted to take the opportunity to make the most out of that and archive as much as possible of the live recordings of the band, especially because I thought at the at the beginning it would be interesting to see how it would start off being one thing and then develop into something else over time and being able to hear that development in kind-of decent quality. (I mean, the mixes are obviously quite rough; there was so much I could do to cover some of my dodgy mixing.) But yeah, knowing that people were interested in listening to live recordings, I just thought to myself, “Why not make them available? Why not have some sort of say in how it sounds?” Because in my experience, sometimes you get people that film and take a lot of care with the audio, even if it’s just a kind of like one microphone source recording. But then you also get people that film, and they’re standing in a part of the crowd that’s not particularly the best for the sound. And then sometimes you think you did a really good show, and then you just click back on it just to reference some sort of section that you’re never being good in, and you’re like, “This sounds horrible! I can’t believe anyone is interested in my band because it sounds terrible!”

Anyway, I just thought it would be interesting to try and do, and I now have multi-track recordings of almost every show. But it is a bit of a rigmarole to then mix every single one; that’s why I’ve only uploaded the first five shows. I’ve got a whole backlog to go through.

NT: Because a lot of the lineup changed throughout the pre-album days, did live shows and going through old recordings help you figure out what kind of band members that you liked playing with, or that you wanted to have on certain songs?

CP: I think that there are a lot of people that I want to play with in London — and a lot of people that I know would be interested in playing with me — and keeping the band open means that I have a chance to play with them when they’re around. You know, just come and play a few songs, come and play one song, come and play one set, come and play a few shows! It means that people can make a commitment to it, but they know that it’s a momentary thing. Even if it’s just for one day or whatever, people are mostly just happy to do it and be involved. I’m not really considering who was “the best” from past shows; I’m more just thinking about who I would like to play with, who I feel would be fun to play with.

Pre-order My New Band Believe by Cameron Picton HERE