My New Band Believe at The Golden Lion

Astonishingly, it’s been three years since black midi split. For math rock nerds and art school cool kids alike, it still stings. Geordie Greep’s wild and occasionally whimsical solo record dried their tears a bit in 2024. Now, Cameron Picton – the band’s former bassist and occasional frontman – offers another comforting hand with My New Band Believe, a project every bit as batshit as Greep’s, but pointed in a very different direction.

It’s built almost entirely from acoustic instruments, using the barest amount of reverb and effects. The results swing hard between two poles. On one side, lush, soul-nourishing chamber arrangements – strings and finger-picked guitar courtesy of most of the members of experimental folk band caroline alongside Kiran Leonard and Steve Noble – make for some of the most straightforwardly gorgeous music Picton has put his name to.

On the other, the record turns feral, sometimes disconcertingly so. Take the coiled violence of the revenge fantasy opener ‘Target Practice’, or the King-Crimsonian, nine-minute ‘Heart of Darkness’, which flips between English folk fingerpicking and American soul before dissolving into a trembling, eerie outro.

It all feels deliberately performative; the record seems to goad its listener as much as reward them (anyone who followed black midi will recognise the instinct). It’s playful with it, though. Picton’s almost like a sibling-style winding you up, sometimes. “I’ve got plans that I’ll never share with you” needles the album’s opening line, before we’ve even taken our seats. Elsewhere we get funny, almost throwaway one-liners that add levity to the sometimes-much-darker-lyrics: “If you’re going to kick me babe, at least let me pick the place” (‘In The Blink Of An Eye’).

Amid all the musical and lyrical turbulence and handbrake turns, at the album’s centre we get the disarming, surprisingly straight-forward domestic ‘Love Story’, with honey-sweet piano and close mic’d vocals directed at ‘the love of my life’. It plays like a little island of calm among the white knuckle energy elsewhere on the record, and it’s more affecting for the contrast.

Live, apparently, the songs are far from facsimiles of the recorded versions. Recent shows have swapped the album’s acoustic core for a leaner electric setup – two guitars, bass, drums. At The Golden Lion, expect something louder, looser and fuzzier, with the songs kind of a platform from which to jump. Like any project launched off the back of the black midi mothership, you wouldn’t really expect it any other way, would you?