My New Band Believe’s debut album began as a fever dream. Delirious in a Chinese hotel room, Cameron Picton was battling through the worst of a sudden illness when he was overcome by flashes of weird imagery and loose ribbons of scrambled text. The musician would later salvage and shape some of these fragments into songs, but the one that lodged most clearly in his mind was the odd phrase, “My New Band Believe.” When it came time to christen his solo project there was no decision to be made; this unwieldy assemblage of words had to be his signature. 

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, and indeed, members of caroline, he guides the listener through a rapidly unfolding multi-verse of their own making. With My New Band Believe, he not only comes into his own as a leader but arranges conflicting, fragmentary, and hysterical ideas until they form a brilliant kind of sense.