Cameron Picton left Black Midi quietly. There was no blow-up, no public drama, just the slow dissolution of one of the more genuinely interesting bands of the last decade, followed by a solo debut that arrives with the unsettling confidence of someone who spent the whole time thinking. My New Band Believe is that record. It is strange, beautiful, stubbornly uncommercial, and among the most considered debut albums released in recent memory.

Picton was the quieter half of Black Midi’s dual-lead dynamic, writing two tracks per album while frontman Geordie Greep commanded most of the room. Those Picton tracks, “Diamond Stuff” and “Eat Men Eat,” gave hints of what he might do on his own: something more textural, more haunted, less interested in volume as a weapon and more in arrangement as architecture. This record delivers on that trajectory in full.

The album opens with “Target Practice,” a two-minute folk nightmare that moves faster than it appears. There are strings underneath Picton’s falsetto, a choir entrance that feels borrowed from something sacred, and lyrics about generational anger that refuse to explain themselves. It is a prelude that promises nothing and delivers everything. From there, the record unfurls across a cast of 22 musicians and 21 singers, none of them consistent, all of them serving whatever the song requires.

“Actress” is probably the closest thing to a center of gravity here. Picton circles themes of ambition and performance, using fire and dragon imagery that sits somewhere between folk tale and fever dream, and his delivery is the key to it: he sings like someone who learned melody from Jessica Pratt and learned anxiety from watching the Windmill scene burn itself out. The two things do not obviously go together. They go together on this record.

The flamenco-influenced nylon-string passages are not a gimmick. The baroque arrangements are not indulgent. Picton has made music that encourages obsession, that rewards repeated listening not because it withholds information but because it keeps generating new ones. There is a numerical analysis he published alongside the album, cataloguing the days recorded, the musicians involved, the age range of collaborators. The numerology is, I think, a joke about the kind of mythologizing that surrounds records like this. But it is also true that the details matter. Picton assembled this carefully. You can hear the care.

There is no single, obvious thing to compare it to, which is rare and genuinely worth saying. The Black Midi lineage is audible as a foundation, but this record is quieter, more interested in space, and more emotionally specific. Picton is writing about real things in an oblique way, and the obliqueness is not evasion. It is precision. He has found a language for what he wants to say, and this record is the first document of what he can say in it.