No one would accuse black-metal innovators Portrayal of Guilt of being optimists. The Austin band, led by singer and guitarist Matt King, have always made good on the bleak promise of their genre’s name. Their 2018 debut full-length, Let Pain Be Your Guide, was bold and brutal, with moments of precious reprieve scattered between bludgeonings. They released back-to-back LPs in 2021, the title of the second of which would get us some complaints if we printed it here. On 2023’s Devil Music, King and his bandmates, bassist Alex Stanfield and drummer James Beveridge, experimented with crusty chamber and classical music alongside their signature onslaught. They are not here to write happy songs.
King and his frosty friend: a Fender Vintera ’70s Telecaster Custom with an aluminum neck from Electrical Guitar Company.
Photo by Tomislav Crnkovič
But their new album, ...Beginning of the End, seems to auger even deeper shades of black. In a genre often racing itself to be the fastest, loudest, and most intense, King, Stanfield, and Beveridge understand that space and slowness can be just as unsettling. If their previous records felt like a relentless descent into darkness, this new collection is a doomed arrival at the frigid, mucky bottom. Opener “Backstabber” dusts itself off and gets its bearings behind a phaser-warped nu-metal guitar lead, before Beveridge’s groove clatters in. It drops the listener into a sort of twisted alternate reality à la Alice in Wonderland, where scabby goblins and warped insects skitter around in the shadows. “Human Terror” follows it with an industrial, whining feedback sample that builds to a Death Grips-style groove, again on the merits of Beveridge’s beat and Stanfield’s syncopated bass line.
“Heaven’s Gate” is classic black-metal mayhem, and true to PoG, it’s mixed to be as caustic and abrasive as possible. But after the thrash-metal crush of “Under Siege,” much of the record plays out like a sludge-crusted concoction of black metal and hip hop, an invigorating melding of Texas music traditions that comes to a head on “Chamber of Misery Pt. IV,” which features veteran Houston rapper Slim Guerilla.
The band recorded ...Beginning of the End with trusted producer Phillip Odom at his Austin studio, Bad Wolf Recordings. King’s goal was to make the record sound as similar as possible to their live shows, and he doesn’t mind being exact in his approach to mixing. “I’ve got to be one of the most difficult people to work with in general, but as far as mixing and stuff, I’ll go crazy if it doesn’t sound exactly the way that I hear it in my head,” he says. “And there’s no way to describe what I want, either.” That leaves him using his hands or other abstract communication methods to explain himself.Matt King’s Gear
Guitars
Fender Vintera ’70s Telecaster Custom w/ EGC Aluminum Neck
Guild S60-D
Amps
Sovtek MiG-60
Sunn Concert Slave
Two Worshiper 4x12 cabinets
Effects
Peterson StroboStomp HD
DigiTech Whammy Ricochet
Boss HM-2
Dead Air Portrayal of Guilt/Matt King Dual Drive
Electro-Harmonix Small Clone
MXR Carbon Copy
Boss RV-6
Old Blood Noise Endeavors Procession
Strings & Picks
Ernie Ball Mammoth Slinky
Ernie Ball Beefy Slinky
Dunlop Tortex .50 mm
Alex Stanfield’s Gear
Guitars and Basses
Sterling by Music Man StingRay
Kramer DMZ 4000
Amps
Sunn Coliseum 880
Traynor TS-140
Worshiper 6x10 cabinet
Effects
TC Electronic PolyTune
Electro-Harmonix Freeze
Electro-Harmonix Bass Clone
Darkglass Microtubes B7K Ultra
Strings & Picks
Ernie Ball Regular Slinky
Ernie Ball Power Slinky
Dunlop Tortex .88 mm
Stanfield plays his aluminum-neck Kramer DMZ 4000.
Photo by Tomislav Crnkovič
However King got his point across, it worked. As usual, he counted on his Sovtek MIG-60, coupled with a handful of pedals. Chief among them was his Dead Air Portrayal of Guilt/Matt King Dual Drive, a crushing dual-channel drive pedal developed between King and Dead Air’s Will Killingsworth. One side is Dead Air’s extra-gnarly TS-style Tube Nightmare circuit, which is goosed by an extended control set and gets both cleaner and filthier than a traditional Screamer. The other side, which can be engaged independently, is a punishing, super-saturated boost. Paired with a Boss HM-2, the signature pedal has formed the basis of King’s clanking, frostbitten guitar tone since 2022. Other key elements include an Electro-Harmonix Small Clone, Boss RV-6, and an Old Blood Noise Endeavors Procession. For his crushing bass parts, Alex Stanfield relied mostly on his Sunn Coliseum head, with a Traynor TS-140 checking in on a couple of songs, too.
“I always like sounds that are bleak and sad, so I’m more or less trying to recreate that with the guitars.”
Conversations about “good” guitar tone usually involve the same handful of adjectives: warm, full, smooth, tube-y, etc. Matt King’s sound is the antithesis of virtually all of those words. His guitar work is frigid and harsh, cavernous and unforgiving. “I always like sounds that are bleak and sad, so I’m more or less trying to recreate that with the guitars,” he explains. For years, King’s longtime primary guitar has been his Guild S-60D, an oddball electric produced between 1977 and 1989. But during the recording of ...Beginning of the End, he bought a Fender Vintera Telecaster and swapped in an aluminum neck from Electrical Guitar Company. It was his main weapon for recording sessions, and it has dethroned the Guild for live use, too. Telecasters already sounded clean and cold to King. “When I threw the aluminum neck on it, it’s just ice-cold,” he grins. “I liked a really trebled-out guitar tone. It just sounds fucked up. It’s my dream guitar tone.
“This band has been an experience in learning how to play guitar better,” King continues. “When I started, I wasn’t exactly good, and I’m still not a shredder, let’s put it that way. But I can write better songs than I ever have.” A big part of that process is experimenting, and when King began toying with modulation, things got interesting. “It’s more or less exploring. I feel like shit got interesting for me when I got a chorus pedal and started messing with that,” he says. “That’s really the main thing: just kind of fucking around.”
Portrayal of Guilt’s work might scan as pessimistic, but King doesn’t see it that way. “Whereas a lot of people try to look at the best of things, I just choose to look directly at what it is,” he says. “Is it the beginning of the end? Who knows? But to me, it feels like we’re on a steady decline."
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