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.

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