Two-thirds of the way through …Beginning of the End, Houston rapper Slim Guerilla pops up for a verse on a 66-second-long song called “Chamber of Misery Pt. IV.” In their nine-year career, Portrayal of Guilt have trained fans to expect unexpected genre detours, but this one still comes as a surprise. Whenever their hardcore-adjacent contemporaries attempt a hip-hop collaboration, it feels at best like a lost B-side from the Judgement Night soundtrack, and at worst, a guileless crossover play for men that attend concerts with the sole intent of exerting testosterone. Underground Vol. 1: 1991-1994 has long been the foundational text for cross-genre nihilists, but the grimy, lo-fi “Chamber of Misery Pt. IV” is the rare hardcore homage that excavates the psychedelic bedrock of gothic Southern rap rather than its surface-level aggression.
The rest of …Beginning of the End sounds nothing like this, and neither do any of the three preceding entries in Portrayal of Guilt’s “Chamber of Misery” series, which dates back to a standalone 2018 single released four months before their debut album. Forged in the teeming pits of Austin’s metal/hardcore scene, PoG absorbed the high-octane thrills of thrash heroes Iron Age as much as the abrasive edge of noisy industrial act Street Sects, and they were immediately able to sporadically deploy these varied influences at will. Their earliest material, including “Chamber of Misery Pt. I,” had clear links to guitarist/vocalist Matt King and drummer James Beveridge’s work in the criminally underrated metal-tinged hardcore band Illustrations. The first two Portrayal of Guilt albums were more like screamo through a black metal lens, bleaker and purple-hued. On 2021’s Christfucker, they abruptly abandoned emotional bloodletting in favor of almost-campy depravity, and that approach carried through the first half of 2023’s Devil Music. But in keeping with PoG’s restless M.O., Side B was a string-led, chamber-goth reprisal of Side A.
…Beginning of the End is their most eclectic offering yet. In video game terms, it’s not necessarily a final boss fight, despite the fact that PoG employ every trick in their arsenal in pursuit of a focused goal. It feels more like returning to previously impossible side-quests that, after experience-boosting slogs, are more rewarding. The album begins with four continuations of the Christfucker and Devil Music sound—just as bleak and ugly, but catchier and craftier. “Human Terror” comes from the school of brute-force, knuckle-dragging hardcore that builds an entire song out of what would traditionally be half-time breakdowns. King limits his wide vocal range to its guttural depths, but the fact that his guitar spends the first half alternating between eerie backwards melodies and jagged triggered samples renders the eventual explosion all the more visceral. The next two tracks, “Heaven’s Gate” and “Under Siege,” share “Human Terror”’s marriage of lizard-brained riffs and arty flourishes. Their return to blistering tempos illustrate the breadth of PoG’s modes—the former via black metal blastbeats, the latter via hardcore d-beat—but both songs transcend on similar trapdoor moments when King and bassist Alex Stanfield slow down and crank up the effects.
If there’s one addition to Portrayal of Guilt’s roiling cauldron of influences, it’s nu-metal. It would be a stretch to link the grooves on “Heaven’s Gate” and “Under Siege” to Korn or Deftones, but they hint at the sense of unpretentious abandon that elevates the album above the rest of PoG’s discography. “Chamber of Misery Pt. IV,” despite its tasteful skirting of “rap-rock” clichés, is the best evidence that the dream of 1998 is alive on this album. Ultimately though, it’s just an interlude. The song that both solidifies the nu-metal comparisons and renders them inadequate is “Ecstasy.” Here, the band taps into the ’80s/’90s UK sounds that, for the past 10 years, have become the safest off-ramp for heavy bands (Ceremony with new wave, Militarie Gun with Britpop, Deafheaven with Slowdive). The song immediately invokes circa-’88 Madchester with its tastefully sampled breakbeats and Stanfield’s laid-back bassline. After just 30 seconds though, it’s clear that Portrayal of Guilt are here to expose the dark underbelly of yet another genre. “Ecstasy” is Madchester if the MDMA pipeline led to fentanyl rather than heroin, “baggy” if it was coined in reference to JNKOs. The 1996 Trainspotting soundtrack expertly depicted drug-induced downward spirals, but play “Ecstasy” during the scene in which a dopesick Ewan McGregor hallucinates his friend’s dead baby on the ceiling and tell me it doesn’t fit better than Underworld’s “Dark and Long.”
The back half of …Beginning of the End might seem more chaotically sequenced. “Chamber of Misery Pt. IV” and its preceding track, the bad-trip experiment “God Will Never Hear Me,” are bookended by songs that begin with the most meathead riffs of Portrayal of Guilt’s career. “Death From Above” and “Total Black” both kick off like they’re inciting crowdkilling, but the former’s marriage of breakdowns and atonal noise imagines an alternate reality in which Henry Rollins’ friendship with Sonic Youth yielded actual collaborations, and Beveridge taps out so many dubby ghost-notes on the latter that he ends up sounding like Stewart Copeland if he was raised on grindcore.
Concluding with the two grungiest compositions in Portrayal of Guilt’s oeuvre, …Beginning of the End comes into focus as a deliberate arc. The album takes a winding descent from instant-gratification headbangers to more meditative, mournful ground, but it wrests idiosyncratic darkness out of every step. Across all of PoG’s genre explorations, the common denominator is a modernist take on misanthropy. They’ve pivoted between howling about humanity’s flaws and extolling Satan’s torture methods, but they have always spoken to a generation living in fear of impending apocalypse. …Beginning of the End is their first album that unites every strain of their malaise under the same roof. It’s proof that Portrayal of Guilt can do anything they want, excel at it, and still sound like Portrayal of Guilt.
