Photo by Craig Murray

“Ecstasy” might not be the first thing that comes to mind whenever you’re listening to Portrayal of Guilt’s music. The experimental heavy music band have made full use of nihilism and howls of agony over the better part of the past decade that has delivered some of the ugliest, brutalist collisions between hardcore, black metal, noise rock, and industrial sounds. Yet, on one of the two early highlights of human terror from the Austin trio’s forthcoming fifth full-length album, …Beginning of the End, you may as well forget every perception you once held of them. The listen arguably is their most singularly uncanny examination on the existential, merging their corrosive corners with palpable, subversive pop textures and hip-hop beats as well as the emergence of clean vocals. “Sentenced to life / I beg for death / ‘Taste this sacred ash and you will be free’.” It’s taken them plunging into the violent void to get here, but maybe on the other side of it all, rapture may be waiting in ways we just haven’t imagined…

Directed by: Craig Murray

Portrayal of Guilt’s …Beginning of the End will be released April 24th on Run for Cover Records.