Cameron Picton (left) of My New Band Believe. Daisy Ayscough and Tomos Ayscough
Over the past decade, several overlapping indie-rock scenes in the U.K. have produced bands that have achieved local popularity thanks to their consistently high-quality music, yet have had only mixed commercial success stateside. A few of these acts make lyrically dense work steeped in the jagged milieu of post-punk, while others have created a sound that is stranger and harder to classify, mixing and matching styles from across generations of experimental music.
Among the latter, Black Midi, formed at the English performing-arts institution BRIT School, seems to put nearly every hyphenated form in a blender -- it's been described as prog-rock, math-rock, jazz-rock and post-punk. The outfit burned hot across three albums, making exciting and challenging music before going on indefinite hiatus in August 2024. After that announcement, Black Midi's vocalist and bassist, Cameron Picton, formed a project called My New Band Believe. Its self-titled debut album (Rough Trade), out now, transports the dense and adventurous bearing of his earlier group into an avant-folk setting.
In some respects, My New Band Believe harks back to indie groups from the mid-2000s, when acts like the Decemberists were making novelistic folk-rock LPs with a mythological bent, complete with strings, horns and winding narratives. Mr. Picton's music shares much of the same instrumentation -- his band draws heavily from members of the sprawling British group Caroline, who moved in some of the same circles as Black Midi -- but there's an air of studied remove to his work, and he never seems as though he wishes to evoke an earlier time. His abstracted approach to genre sometimes recalls the work of Van Dyke Parks, and he explicitly wrote many of the songs here with the jazz-inflected sophistication of British folk guitarists John Renbourn and Bert Jansch in mind.
On each side of the record, four tracks flow one into the next. The brief "Target Practice" opens the LP with a jaunty acoustic guitar figure and Mr. Picton’s somewhat reedy voice, and then adds a string section and massed voices that ratchet up the density and volume. After just two minutes, it explodes in a burst of sound that leads directly to the hectic "In the Blink of an Eye." Changes unfold quickly, and the melodies are dynamic in a way that recalls musical theater—overlapping sections suggest a narrative progression even when the words are difficult to follow.
Mr. Picton’s approach to structure is aggressively mutable, but his arrangements are almost entirely acoustic. His nimble shifts between tempos and instrumentation reach an early peak on the 8 1/2-minute "Heart of Darkness." In an interview with the online publication the Line of Best Fit, Mr. Picton describes it as a "Transatlantic" piece, darting between influences from the U.S. and U.K. It includes folk of the British and Appalachian varieties, jazzy interludes, and neoclassical orchestrations. The lyrics are often inscrutable, with odd asides ("In an empty paddock, your stock-feed rots / The echoes of the black dog haunt you"). There are creaky sections with various bits of percussion and tapped string overtones conveying an otherworldly Harry Partch-like texture, the sort of junkyard orchestra that inspired Tom Waits in the 1980s.
With his words, Mr. Picton is playing with ideas, trying out phrases, idly offering questions without necessarily understanding where his stories are going. His lyrics are refreshing, clearly about human yearning but never seeming confessional or like he has a specific point to make. They let the listener fill in the blanks, and the broader meaning tends to sink in subliminally.
"D'you want potatoes or rice tonight? / Pick up some onions / I'm making dinner," goes another memorable image. That lyric is heard over a minor-key piano in "Love Story," the last track on the first side. But while the moody harmonic progression and title might suggest an ode, nothing in Mr. Picton’s songs is ever easy, or obvious. While his amorous expressions feel sincere, at one point in the short tune he sings "A mеtal spike from the sky / Precisе and poisoned / Somehow avoided me" and reaches for his partner in the night, but no one is home.
The album's penultimate track, "Actress," is another eight-minute-plus epic, and its movement between whispered folk and thick, dissonant orchestrations is joyful. "You're breathing oxygen / But it doesn't make it to your brain / Your useless veins, just helpless," he sings in words that look harsh on paper but are delivered with a sunny lilt. Mr. Picton's playful spirit renders the complexity approachable.
There's no question his work can be overwhelming -- being "too much" is the point. It's music that demands you either pay attention or turn it off. But for those with an ear for knotty structures that sometimes feel like puzzle pieces, taking in the whole of the record is rewarding, even fun.