Portrayal of Guilt

Out of Austin, 2017

Portrayal of Guilt formed in Austin, Texas in 2017 around vocalist and guitarist Matt King and drummer James Beveridge. The original line-up also included bassist Blake Given and Rick Flores on electronics and sampling; both left in 2019, when Alex Stanfield took over bass. The band has been a trio since.

King has said the project started from his love of screamo, and the early records show it. The debut album Let Pain Be Your Guide arrived on 16 November 2018 through Holy Roar, Gilead Media and Through Love, and the band spent the surrounding years touring with Centuries, Majority Rule, Planning for Burial and Street Sects, and opening for Pg. 99, Majority Rule and Skeletonwitch. A run of split releases with Street Sects (2018), Soft Kill (2019), Slow Fire Pistol (2020) and Chat Pile (2021) kept them in the small-venue circuit that shaped their reputation. In February 2019 The Washington Post credited them with delivering new life to screamo, an early sign the band was being noticed outside the hardcore press.

Two albums in one year

The second album, We Are Always Alone, came out on 29 January 2021 through Closed Casket Activities. Less than ten months later, on 5 November 2021, Christfucker followed on Run For Cover, the label the band has stayed with since. Speaking to New Noise at the time, King said the aim was an album that sounded like it came straight from Hell, and the record hardened the band's black metal edge while keeping the short, violent song lengths of their hardcore roots.

Devil Music followed on 20 April 2023, again on Run For Cover. By then the band's touring history had widened well beyond the DIY circuit: King told Echoes and Dust in April 2026 that they had toured with Baroness, Touché Amoré and Sumac, and several Devil Music songs, among them One Last Taste of Heaven, Where Angels Come to Die and the title track, remain fixtures of the current set.

…Beginning of the End

The fifth album was announced on 4 March 2026 with two singles. Ecstasy set hip-hop drum patterns and nu-metal riffing under black metal vocals; Human Terror paired industrial grooves with avant-garde guitar. The full record arrived on 24 April 2026 with artwork by Collin Fletcher, and it is the band's third full-length for Run For Cover.

King explained the making of it to No Echo on 23 April 2026. Touring wiped out plans to write in 2024, so the work shifted to 2025 and was done largely as computer demos, because Beveridge was living in New York. That let King sit with songs and add layers in a way the band had not done before. Phillip Odom recorded and mixed the album between March and June 2025, and Will Yip mastered it. Asked about the nu-metal references, King was direct: Korn is his favourite band, and he admires Limp Bizkit's Wes Borland as a guitarist. He described the shift as a natural progression rather than a plan.

The record's oddest moment is Chamber of Misery Pt. IV, a one-minute track featuring the rapper Slim Guerilla. King told Echoes and Dust he built a guitar loop and a small drum beat intended as an interlude, sent it over, and Guerilla returned a finished verse the same day. King has said he would like to work with Project Pat and Three 6 Mafia in future, though Guerilla rarely performs live with bands. Director Craig Murray made three videos for the campaign, which King compared to the storyline clips of old MTV2 and Fuse.

Louder Than War's Sean Millard gave the album four stars out of five on 21 March 2026, calling it a great addition to the catalogue and finding a discreet maturity that made it richer and more engrossing. He picked Under Siege, at two minutes thirteen seconds with an anthemic chorus, as track of the album, praised the bass tone on Human Terror, heard trip-hop in Ecstasy's breakbeats and sludge in Death From Above, and noted death growls on Total Black and cleaner guitar on Object of Pain before The Last Judgment closes the record at four minutes fifteen. Heaven's Gate runs one minute forty-one. The album does not linger.

Where they stand in 2026

The band ended 2025 supporting Deafheaven across the UK and Europe. King told Echoes and Dust the tour was bigger than he had expected, singling out London and Switzerland, and called their Damnation Festival set in Manchester the best show the band has ever played. On 17 April 2026, a week before the album came out, they played Roadburn in Tilburg for the second time, with the festival's programme describing samples, glitches, discordant melody and break-neck changes of direction underneath the heaviness.

The spring North American tour ran 27 dates from Austin on 9 May 2026 to Atlanta on 7 June, through New Orleans, Chicago, Detroit, Toronto and New York. Street Sects, the industrial duo the band last toured with in 2018 and 2019, played every night, with pageninetynine, Taraneh, Halloween and The Infinity Ring rotating on regional legs. King runs Portrayal of Guilt Records on the side and is developing albums with two other projects, Fleshripper and Psalm, having retired his project Test about a year before the No Echo interview. He also said Beveridge might move back to Austin, which would allow regular rehearsals and could change how the next record is written.

The road ahead: west coast, Machine Girl, then Europe

The next leg begins on 12 September 2026 at the Tower Theatre in Oklahoma City and runs through the south-west, California and the Pacific north-west to Denver on 29 September, Kansas City on 1 October and Tulsa on 2 October. The rooms are small by design: Whistle Stop Bar in San Diego, Thee Stork Club in Oakland, Kilby Court in Salt Lake City, Neurolux in Boise. In mid-October the band steps up to theatres for three dates with Machine Girl: The National in Richmond on 13 October, Vinyl Music Hall in Pensacola on 15 October and the Civic Theatre in New Orleans on 19 October.

The UK and European tour, announced on 5 August 2026, opens at Core Festival in Glasgow on 13 November and takes in Leeds (Boom), Brighton (Chalk), Bristol (Rough Trade), Nottingham (The Bodega), Liverpool (Quarry), Newcastle (Anarchy Brew Co.), Manchester (Club Academy) and Norwich (Waterfront Studio) on consecutive nights to 21 November. Spike Hellis support every UK date after Glasgow and continue through Switzerland, Italy, Croatia, Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Munich. Crouch take over from Wiesbaden on 3 December through Stuttgart, Tilburg and Brussels, and Oathbreaker join for the final stretch: Paris on 7 December, Cologne, Berlin's Kesselhaus, Karlsruhe and Ghent's Vooruit on 11 December.

The 2026 set, averaged across shows logged on setlist.fm, runs to about fourteen songs and opens with three new ones in a row: Under Siege, Death From Above and Heaven's Gate. Burning Hand, One Last Taste of Heaven, Where Angels Come to Die, Possession, The Sixth Circle and Devil Music fill the middle, with Sadist, Fall From Grace and The Crucifixion leading into The Last Judgement as the closer. At the Philadelphia show on 3 June 2026 the band also worked in Chamber of Misery Pt. IV and …where the suffering never ends.