We Are Always Alone

Album review

Portrayal of Guilt are a band that writes about darkness. On their celebrated 2018 debut Let Pain Be Your Guide, the Austin, TX, group churned through a tortured meld of screamo, black metal, and obsidian metalcore that wallowed in themes of suicidal ideation, nihilism, and existential suffering. Since then, the trio has released a couple splits that took their sound in an even more muscular direction, shedding the emotionality of screamo for more brutal styles of metal riffage. We Are Always Alone, their sophomore statement, is a nine-song outing as dark and eclectic as Pain, but somehow even heavier.

On this project, frontman Matt King leans harder into the demonic shriek portion of his vocal range, giving extraordinarily bleak songs like "They Want Us All to Suffer" and "Garden of Despair" a truly ghoulish pulse. Although its opening track lives on the shadowy borders of screamo, and the record boasts guest appearances from Chris Taylor of Pg. 99 and Matt Michel of Majority Rule, two of the most important bands in the history of screamo, most of this record feels more consciously aimed toward the metal universe.
The guitars and bass are down-tuned to subterranean levels—"Masochistic Oath" features whirring black metal guitars, and "My Immolation" contains a haunting clean vocal passage that sounds like something Code Orange would have pulled on 2014's metallic I Am King. Like their first album, this is cut with creepy industrial noises that sound like snippets of a horror movie soundtrack. For a band operating within the world of hardcore, these atmospheric embellishments are unique touch that gives their music a sense of netherworldly place, but sometimes the abrupt cuts to silence or a sole clattering noise do kill the momentum and make the flow of the record somewhat bumpy. However, at the end of the day, Portrayal of Guilt don't make music for comfort, and We Are Always Alone does what it sets out to do: to make the listener feel as blackpilled and tormented about the world as they do. © Eli Enis/Qobuz