New Music Friday can be a lot. That's why every week we cut it down to the songs you need to hear for PLAY, our new music edit, and deliver a new cover feature to go alongside it. This week... Beartooth.
When Caleb Shomo left Attack Attack! in 2014, he walked away from a scene in which he had "a lot of turmoil I wanted to get away from", and into Beartooth: a snarling, malevolent exercise in catharsis. Their debut album, 'Disgusting', evidenced Caleb's determination to do things his way, to go back to his roots and channel all his anger, all his trauma, into the band's very fabric.
Twelve years later, Caleb and Co. are back with their sixth studio album, 'PURE ECSTASY', unfurling the same soul-bearing, brutally honest lyricism over a vast, sprawling array of sonics that draw inspiration from across the musical spectrum. This is Caleb at his most true, his most effervescent, and his most vulnerable.
It's been two years since the last Beartooth record. What made 'The Surface' something of a left turn for the band was the positivity etched into every inch of the album, documenting a moment in Caleb's life that shone more clearly than any other, either before or since. Freshly sober and firing on all cylinders, it was a high that burned bright, but burned quickly.
"I was a lot happier with things in my life; I was more content," Caleb recalls, "I had started this journey of self-love and self-discovery, and a lot of things aligned in my life to allow me to be there."
He continues: "When I made the song 'Riptide', that was like this mission statement, like, 'I'm done exploring my pain; I want to feel euphoria'. It was a week after I quit boozing, it's like I put that away, and it forced me to look inward for the first time, to look at why I'm in that pain. I made 'The Surface' in that initial high after I put the booze down, but this record is realising the rabbit hole is a lot deeper than I was willing to admit."
As such, while 'PURE ECSTASY' bounces off some of the ideas that were present in that lighter period of Caleb's life and subsequently on 'The Surface', it nonetheless sits more comfortably in the more 'traditional' Beartooth album category.
Exploring topics such as the price of fame ('STADIUMS'), generational religious trauma ('BEAUTIFUL AGAIN'), and the fear that you'll never reach your goals ('I MADE IT'), the album is enriched by the introspection and fearlessness of Caleb's songwriting.
The album's title, then, isn't a reference to Caleb's mindset or to what he describes as a record with "very little positivity on it at all", but more to a desire to keep his head up whilst acknowledging all the things he is yet to resolve.
"There were a lot of different ways that this record could have been wrapped up and packaged," he reflects.
"I think so much of this record is overwhelmingly dark, but, to me, calling it 'PURE ECSTASY' was a continuation of that mission statement, that this is all for something, this is all for finding joy and finding love for myself. It's allowing myself to just be who I am, to live the life I want to live. It reached a point where I just thought, 'Fuck it, do you want to focus on the pain, or do you want to focus on the point of the pain?'. The only way out is through."
That sentiment, Caleb getting to the deepest and truest root of himself, bleeds into the sonic palette at the heart of the record, one which spills out into sludgy doom metal guitar lines, hook-heavy punk choruses, and flecks of electronica and almost R&B intonation.
"The only influence I was chasing was empowerment"
— Caleb Shomo
To listen to 'Pure Ecstasy' is to listen to a songwriter unafraid to break out of the tribalism of metalcore, inspired by artists as disparate as Ariana Grande and Underoath. The sheer breadth of ideas, stretching into previously untapped areas, called for the help of someone well-known for taming seemingly uncontrollable musical madness: Jordan Fish.
The first time Caleb has co-produced a Beartooth album with an 'outsider', it was Jordan's touch and undeniable ability to turn the most complex sounds into a coherent that transformed the record, creating a universe within which all the songs slowly began to co-exist and make sense.
Starting with lead single, 'FREE', the pair's shared vision of what the band is and has always been to both Caleb and Beartooth fans alike became the North Star through which they navigated their way to 'PURE ECSTASY'.
"We'd been talking about working together for a while, and one day he hit me up and said, 'I'm in LA with the afternoon off, do you want to work on something?' – like, no shit, of course I do!
"He came over to my place, and we talked for a few hours, talking about what I'm going through, what life's like, what music I'm listening to. We started working and just rode the vibe, and then 'FREE' came out; I showed it to my label, and it was like, 'Yeah, this feels different'."
"I had so much material that was so vast and so many different styles," he adds, "but the only influence I was chasing was power and empowerment. I was thinking about Metallica – this aggressive display of power – or Prince, who is so empowering because he was so unapologetically himself."
From there, Jordan became a vital part of the process, taking Caleb's somewhat scattergun approach to creating tracks, integrating influences, and refocusing it around a central Beartooth ethos.
"To take all that stuff and turn it so unashamedly into a Beartooth record with Jordan was the moment it all really came together; he's so good at having a North Star of what the point of the band is."
He continues: "This is the first time I've done proper co-production with somebody, but why I felt like it was so important and it changed everything is that, once I'd showed him everything I had – which was pretty avant-garde, pretty out there – he called me a few weeks later like, 'This is an amazing palette, but I don't really know what you're saying'.
"[Jordan] said, 'I'm not sure if you're saying everything clearly, and to me, Beartooth has to be you being 100% honest', and he was right – I'd let myself explore freely in the art, in the music, in the process, but it wasn't a Beartooth record. Then, within the course of about three weeks, all of it was rewritten and rearranged, and we wrote five more songs from scratch."
"We just were like kids in the studio"
— Caleb Shomo
In this way, a years-long journey to figure out what Caleb wanted to say and who he wants to be ultimately came together within the space of a month, making it, in Caleb's words, "just lightning in a bottle".
"It's this time capsule of this very specific moment of my life," he notes, "trying to explain musically the feeling of complete duality between the absolute deepest and darkest depths of pain and despair, while simultaneously feeling the most joy and freedom that I've ever felt in my life."
As much as Beartooth's raison d'être has always been as a vessel for Caleb to express himself in the purest way possible, it is nonetheless a behemoth that relies upon collaboration. At the end of the day, Beartooth is still a band, and it was only through working with trusted musicians and engineers that 'Pure Ecstasy' became the force of nature that it is today.
"I think what really brought [the record] to life was when I flew out our drummer, Connor. He's literally the best rock drummer on this fucking planet. He came out to this studio called NRG, where Linkin Park, Papa Roach, and Korn all recorded in the early 2000s.
"We just got this drum sound, and that changed the feel of the record to me. We treated recording in the same way that was treating the writing process; he asked me if I wanted him to learn the parts note-for-note, I said, 'Fuck no, dude! Go in, listen to the song and learn the groove, then just figure it out your own way'."
He adds: "The only people we were working with were people that I really trust and I really appreciate – like Skyler Acord from Issues or my friend Misha Mansour from Periphery – like they're brilliant, so I'm not going to tell them what to do.
"We just were like kids in the studio, and that was a really important part of it; it was such an important feeling I was trying to capture while writing these lyrics and melodies – I needed that complete freedom and childlike – so I made sure I was surrounding myself with people I felt fully confident in."
"I really want this record to be the building blocks of the rest of my life"
— Caleb Shomo
For anyone who has been with Beartooth since the beginning, 'Pure Ecstasy' might well feel like a world away from the guttural, urgent metalcore of Beartooth's first three records; in some ways, it might feel like a different band altogether. Being in a band of this sort, one inspired by sentiment rather than sonics, is all about growing with each passing year, something which Caleb knows all too well.
"God, I think about that all the time," Caleb smirks. "I'm listening to this record so much and practising it vocally to prepare for tours and then we'll do an old song like 'The Lines' and I'm like…how did we get here?
"But I mean, if I really look at it, it makes perfect sense because the mission statement of Beartooth out of the gate was just fucking honesty. Those old records were made coming out of Attack Attack!, and me wanting to just do the opposite. That band was more on the 'pop side' of the scene and carried a lot of shit I wanted to get away from, so I was just thinking 'fuck that' and went back to guitar, bass, drums, fucking riffs, fucking energy!"
He continues: "But that's all just a palette for me expressing whatever I was feeling, and that changes and grows, what I listen to changes and grows. The point is just me expressing myself, so if that doesn't change, what does that say? I'm in a very new place in my life – did I ever think when I started Beartooth that it would lead me here? God no, but I'm very happy it has."
There's an argument to be made that, now six albums in, Beartooth have really broken out. Exploring sounds, themes, and ideas that seemed alien until recently has created an album that is fearless in its reach, gut-wrenching in its honesty, and unapologetic in its ambition.
Looking forward to this next album cycle, Caleb admits: "I really want this record to be the building blocks of the rest of my life, meaning how I live day-to-day, how much freedom I allow myself and how honestly I can express myself every day.
"I think this record really helped me come to terms with and figure out one of the biggest roots of my self-deprecation, this thing that I just thought was incurable, and there's no way I could have got there without this album. It's been so difficult, but it's like I'm really me for the first time."
Beartooth's album 'Pure Ecstasy' is out 28th August.
