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.
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…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.
