For visitors navigating the vibrant nightlife of Hackney, the former industrial warehouses and art-deco theaters of East London have long served as epicenters of Britain’s emerging subcultures. At the heart of this scene is EartH (Evolutionary Arts Hackney), a multi-disciplinary venue in the unvarnished guts of a former cinema that, after years as a pool hall, since 2018 has carved out a niche as mid-level stop off for a loose collective of indie, experimental and alternative acts that are way too big for nearby music haunt Cafe Oto, but still niche enough to not be bothering London’s bigger, corporate-infused live venues. And it’s here on a balmy Saturday in May that My New Band Believe, the ambitious new project from Cameron Picton, pass through and add its sound.
As a former co-frontman of the mercury-nominated black midi, Picton was instrumental in creating some of the most frantic, avant-garde music of the decade. Following that band’s high-profile dissolution, ending as abruptly as it started, his debut self-titled record is folk maximalist statement of intent that replaces jagged electric guitars with lush, acoustic arrangements, featuring a rotating supergroup of musicians from acclaimed London bands like caroline and Black Country, New Road.
At EartH, this transition felt like the final, necessary split of the black midi atom. If his former bandmate Geordie Greep (who TTM caught at last year’s Oya Festival in Oslo) is the project’s chaotic Yang – a manic, theatrical autocrat who dominates the stage and his players – Picton is the stabilizing, inward-looking Yin. The stage geometry place Picton sat at the furthest back corner of the ensemble, leaving a vast, symbolic empty space in the center for his musicians to inhabit. Very chill.
Between the sprawling, orchestral shifts of “In the Blink of an Eye” and the haunting, precise plucking of “Target Practice,” the atmosphere is almost nonchalant, until those moments when a percussive din or atonal climax in the music locks you in. Still, Picton finds time to talk about slicing a finger whilst cutting a lime in the green room, and takes a few minutes struggling to remove the plaster that’s messing with his fret work. All too human, indeed.
The sold-out room offered a perfect cross-section of this London moment: a faithful contingent of BBC 6 Music Dads nodding alongside the Gen Z Heroes and Cindys who have made this brand of “difficult” music their own. Talking heads at the bar might argue My New Band Believe are an offshoot of the so-called “Windmill Scene” – the DIY Brixton circuit that birthed this generation of experimentalists. While Picton himself has recently pushed back against the label, preferring to let the music exist outside of a geographic box, the lineage and its draw was undeniable.
Across the indie music spectrum this groundedness and authenticity is a sharp counterpoint to the current furore around the likes of Geese, the American indie experimentalist accused of being an industry “psy-op.” While that group and their frontman, another Cameron, this time Winter, are currently mired in controversy over hiring agencies to use “trend simulation” and fake fan accounts to manufacture a global breakthrough, Picton is building his audience the old-fashioned way. Either way, this Tale of Two Camerons that suggests the health of the alternative scene is actually quite rude; whether through high-gloss disruption or quiet, experimental craft, the appetite for something genuinely “other” has never been stronger – and that can only be a good thing.