My New Band Believe, photo by Daisy Ayscough and Tomos Ayscough

Every Friday, Relix surveys the wealth of new music released over the past seven days and selects standouts for the Relix Staff Picks playlist. Read on for the highlights from this week’s batch, presented by Qobuz: experience the difference with high-quality music streaming and human-curated selections from the platform that puts artists first.

“My New Band Believe” came to Cameron Picton in a moment of ecstatic clarity amid the soul-shivering rushes of food poisoning. Recovering in a hotel room in Xi’an in 2023, those words struck him before he realized he’d need a new band at all, and after black midi abruptly parted ways in 2024, he found himself exhausted by the thought of forming another outfit. It took two years of tinkering with new material to find a middle way to assume the title he’d dreamed up, tapping a revolving cast of peers for piecemeal sessions shaped into the daunting sonic architecture that lines his solo debut with spires, turrets, jagged gutter joints and scattered windows into the bandleader’s individual perspective.

Picton heralded My New Band Believe in New York last month by taking freshly pressed LPs to the living room stereos of whatever fans would host him. Early on in the citywide listening sessions, Picton stopped by the Relix office and gladly answered questions from the team, but largely let the music speak for itself. He took a similar tack to introduce the project in an opaque release accompanying the non-album single “Numerology,” which evokes the cluttered wonder and immediacy colliding in his compositions:

“We worked at 11 different studios across 10 London postcodes with 9 different recording engineers. The record features 23 string instruments¹, 22 musicians, 21 singers, 20 minutes of music on side A, 19 seconds of silence, an 00018 copy made by Andy Ramsay, 17 minutes of music on Side B, 16 letters in the phrase My New Band Believe, 15 layered string septets on Love Story, 14 visits to the cinema on recording days, 13 not sure, 12 acoustic guitars, 11 instances of the word “believe”, 10 horns, “night” 9 times, multiple 8+ minute-long songs… There are 5 drummers on My New Band Believe, 4 pianos played by 3 people, only 2 of them pianists, and 1 toy accordion.”

The latest batch of Relix Staff Picks also includes new music from Sierra Hull, the Gregg Allman Band, Brown Horse, Club d’Elf, Prism Shores, Joe Jackson, Steve Gunn and many more gems. Tune in here.