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The profile · researched 18 October 2026
Portraits and the 3,769-kilometre record
Portraits are two Los Angeles guitarists who built their first album in separate bedrooms on different continents and have spent October 2026 opening for Plini across North America, four days after releasing their second.
A band built across a 3,769-kilometre gap
Portraits is the work of two guitarists who never shared a room while making their first album. Joshua De La Victoria and Joseph Anidjar wrote, recorded and mixed the debut, Buy High, in two bedrooms 3,769 kilometres apart — a detail the band chose to put on the record's own download page rather than into a biography. The pair take the credits for production and sound design between them, Anidjar handled the mix, and Mike Kalajian mastered. The group lists Los Angeles as home and calls itself a progressive instrumental band, with a parenthetical "for the most part" left in to account for the singers who turn up on two of the nine tracks.
The first music released under the name came earlier: a single, "Traveller", in 2021, self-produced like everything since. Buy High followed on 28 July 2023 with no label apparatus behind it. Writing, recording, mixing and the visual side have all stayed in-house, which makes Portraits less a band in the touring sense than a two-man production shop that occasionally hires a rhythm section.
Buy High, and the players brought in to finish it
The debut runs nine tracks and a little over 32 minutes, which is short for a genre that tends towards sprawl. It is shaped rather than simply sequenced: "Eterna" opens as a 1:26 overture, "Quinten Seventino" sits at 1:54 as a midpoint breather, and the title track at position two is answered by "Sell Low" at position seven. The two longest pieces, "Buy High" at 4:42 and "Negative Space" at 4:18, carry most of the weight.
Both of the album's vocal appearances are guests rather than members. Gabriel Levi sings on the title track and Michael Lessard, of The Contortionist, takes "Sell Low". Jacob Umansky played bass across the record and Troy Wright played drums. That division — a fixed writing core of two guitarists, with bass, drums and voices commissioned per release — is the structural fact about Portraits, and it explains why the personnel on stage is not the personnel on the sleeve.
Vaguely Western, recorded in a flat
The second album, Vaguely Western, came out on 2 October 2026: eight tracks, roughly 37 minutes, opening with the 5:25 "Stereoscope" and closing with "Psyche & Matter" at 5:03. The band's own one-line description of it reads "Same but different also somehow more", which is about as much editorialising as they offer. De La Victoria took the production credit this time, Anidjar mixed again, and George Lever mastered.
The supporting cast shifted. Umansky returned on bass, Lang Zhao replaced Wright on drums, and the single vocal track, "Seeker", went to Madeleine Daye. The making of it was documented by the band itself in two videos titled "Recording a Prog Album in My Apartment", circulated through guitar-focused outlets in August 2026 — not a studio diary in the promotional sense so much as a straightforward account of tracking a record in a domestic room, which is where both albums have now been made.
Where they stand in October 2026
The release was timed against a tour rather than the other way round. On 5 June 2026 the Australian guitarist Plini announced his An Unnameable Desire North American headline run — 31 shows between 6 October and 8 November 2026, with Night Verses second on the bill and Portraits opening. Plini's own note on the announcement said the band had just finished in Europe and that the reception had been better than he could have dreamed of. Vaguely Western landed four days before the first date, in San Diego.
It is a significant step up in room size for a project with almost no press footprint. The run takes in the Mohawk in Austin, White Oak Music Hall in Houston, the Studio at The Bomb Factory in Dallas, the Masquerade's Hell room in Atlanta, Irving Plaza in New York and the Paradise Rock Club in Boston, among others. The coverage gap is measurable: by the middle of October, setlist.fm had logged only one complete Portraits set from the tour, despite the band having played every night since the opener.
The set as it stands
That one documented set, from the Mohawk in Austin on 9 October 2026 as part of ACL Nights, ran six songs: "Stereoscope", "Glitch", "Tranquil", "Red Bourbon", "Language & Thought" and "Psyche & Matter". Five of the six come from Vaguely Western, which was a week old at that point. Nothing from Buy High made the cut — an unusual choice for a band with only two records, and a sign that the current show is being built around the new material rather than a career summary.
On album run-times those six pieces come to roughly 28 minutes, which is the shape of a first-of-three support slot. Doors on the tour have been early, 6pm at several of the October stops, and the bill runs three deep before the headline set. "Tranquil" is the outlier in the set, appearing on neither album, and is the one piece an audience arriving from the records would not recognise.
The show, now
Portraits are currently playing the opening slot on Plini's An Unnameable Desire North American tour, a 31-date run from 6 October to 8 November 2026 on which Night Verses take the middle position. The one set from the tour logged in full — the Mohawk in Austin on 9 October 2026, part of ACL Nights — was six songs: "Stereoscope", "Glitch", "Tranquil", "Red Bourbon", "Language & Thought" and "Psyche & Matter". Five are from Vaguely Western, released a week earlier; nothing from the 2023 debut was played. On album run-times that is about 28 minutes, consistent with a first-of-three slot, and doors have been at 6pm at several stops including Atlanta, Dallas and Houston. The live band is not the recording band: the records are made by De La Victoria and Anidjar with bass, drums and vocals commissioned per release. Rooms on the run include the Studio at The Bomb Factory in Dallas, the Masquerade's Hell room in Atlanta, Irving Plaza in New York and the Paradise Rock Club in Boston. Documented audience reaction is thin — by mid-October only that single Austin set had been recorded on setlist.fm.
Researched from listentoportraits.bandcamp.com · listentoportraits.bandcamp.com · truthinshredding.com · holdtight.co · setlist.fm