For almost 15 years, Beartooth's Caleb Shomo has bore his innermost through music, but nothing compares to that of new album Pure Ecstasy, the most intimate and emotional exploration to date, coming after a life-changing period of acceptance. In an exclusive interview with Kerrang!, the frontman generously shares his story of development and personal reconciliation...
Some conversations can be inspirational. They might come at a pivotal moment in your life, when answers aren’t forthcoming from the usual sources, and you need a push in the right direction, even if you’re not sure what the right direction is.
It might not necessarily be someone you know well who provides it either, a friend or a family member, but someone who happens to be understanding of your situation, so can give the perfect piece of advice when you’ve stopped seeing the wood for the trees.
At the beginning of this year, Caleb Shomo found himself in need of someone like that. That someone turned out to be Jordan Fish.
Prior to the two men crossing paths, Caleb had set himself a parameter for what would become Beartooth’s sixth album. “The goal was to provide myself with a space where I could explore and push myself when it comes to headspace, to music, to lyrics, and just ideas in general,” he explains now at home in Los Angeles, where he practices a regimen of therapy, good diet, exercise and plenty of sleep.
It’s obviously paying dividends, as he appears trim and muscular, with his new tussled hairstyle and clean shaven look a far cry from the long tresses, bandana and beard of yore. He seems happy too, albeit sporadically, given there are topics in our hour-long chat that touch upon painful areas. Despite this, he’s as kind and considerate with K! as we try to be with him, realising it’s a nervous proposition asking a relative stranger questions of a sensitive nature.
“Please speak freely, and I’ll do the same,” Caleb says sweetly.
That candour comes later, though. Firstly we’re focusing on Caleb’s work that would become Pure Ecstasy, but at a point before Jordan became involved, back in January and February of 2025, when he co-wrote the track For Me By Me with his friend and former Issues bassist Skyler Acord.
“[For Me By Me] was the much broader perspective that the entire record started with, which was just me exploring empowerment and exploring power. That’s the only song on the record that didn’t get massively overhauled and is pretty close to how it was originally. You can hear in that song this optimistic energy, which made way for this year of really pushing myself and experimenting, musically and lyrically.”
Almost a year later, Caleb hunkered down to write songs with Jordan. The former Bring Me The Horizon man-turned-producer du jour has a gift for communicating with fellow musicians, however different their lives are from his own, in order to access the truest music and performances possible – as illustrated by his work with Evanescence on their recent sixth album, Sanctuary.
When it came time for the duo to work together, they first sat and talked at length, a process Caleb insists on with any prospective collaborator, few though there have been. They discussed their lives, their successes, failures, fears, and anything else they were dealing with – some of which, in Caleb’s case, was yet to become public knowledge.
Afterwards, in an afternoon, they came up with the catchy and contemplative Free, which features the lyrics, ‘See the path in my head / Scared of where it goes / Do I love it? / Do I hate it? / I wanna know / Am I really lonely or am I the reason I’m alone’. Given their productive bond, Caleb asked the “brilliant” Jordan to co-produce the record-in-progress. Jordan was keen, having enjoyed the experience, though he had one stipulation.
“He felt it was very important for me to open up and be honest about things, instead of making things more out-there lyrically or just creating a sense of mood,” reveals Caleb. “He was like, ‘You’re Beartooth, dude – say what you mean! That’s literally what you do! That’s how you, and anybody else, connect to your music. Write about everything you’re going through, anything you’re comfortable with, even anything you’re uncomfortable with, to see where it takes you’.”
So that’s what he did. During a three-week period, they overhauled the music that had been accumulated, bringing it bang up to date with a period Caleb describes as “truly the most emotionally chaotic of my entire life, no question.”
The result is the most honest, artful, experimental, impactful and sad record Caleb has ever made. And much has happened since its creation.
“Today I feel really good,” he says now in answer to the question on everyone’s lips, a month on from the Instagram statement in which he announced to his fans that he’s gay. He seems relaxed, which, given how few interviews he’s done of late, is rather surprising. Especially because he’s more wary of this process, having seen a more dastardly side of the media after becoming a bigger news story than he had anticipated.
“We’re a mid-sized metal band and when I said what I said I really thought it would just be in our world,” he suggests. But before long, he began receiving messages from unknown numbers, from tabloid journalists trying to solicit comments and personal details. “It just blew up into this whole thing, with the mainstream press getting a hold of it, creating a narrative that created all these issues. That’s not what this is about – this is about me being able to freely express myself in my life, my art, and in my music.”
With the worst of that intrusion seemingly over, the key to our hero’s positive mindset is being productive. “I’ve been sinking my teeth into preparations for our tour in September,” he reveals. “I’ve tried to give myself three months of really hard prep. I’ve been doing two-hour, 30-song practices. My voice feels great, my body feels great, and my mind is feeling pretty good at the moment, which I’ll take.”
Those last words are telling. Caleb’s wellbeing is evidently the subject of day to day fluctuations.
“It feels somewhat complicated at times,” elaborates Caleb. “There have just been so many seismic life changes in the last nine months. So, right now, my focus on life is just enjoying my 24 hours and trying to remember that, for me, that requires a lot, regardless of where I am in my life.”
Back in the early days of Caleb's former band Attack Attack!, when the Ohio metalcore outfit were making their debut album, 2008’s Someday Came Suddenly, he would pay close attention to the work of producer Joey Sturgis. Joey had become a big name in the scene by that stage, having helmed records by the likes of Asking Alexandria and The Devil Wears Prada, so the then-15-year-old Caleb wanted to learn everything he could from him.
When not recording his own parts, Caleb would sit behind Joey and watch what he was doing like a hawk, getting the same production program once studio time was over, then sitting in his bedroom at his parent’s house to put into practice what he’d learned. For three days straight. Without sleep.
This story illustrates the intensity of Caleb’s hyperfocus, attributable to his ADHD, which has a major impact on his everyday life. His aforementioned wellbeing regimen also helps with this. Because if his hyperfocus goes unchecked, he can end up depleted of dopamine and adrenaline, leading him to end up “fried” and in a hole of inactivity that leaves him more susceptible to the depressive episodes that have punctuated his life.
“I really believed success could help me run from who I am”
It was a different story when Caleb made Beartooth’s debut EP, back when he had nothing on the line so the process was fun. These days, however, it can be a more volatile proposition affected by how well the creative process is going.
“If I have a positive experience with it, that keeps me coming back for more,” explains Caleb. “Then it’s not long until I find myself in one of those zones, like that January-February period with Jordan, where I’m working 14-16 hours a day, locked the fuck in. Sure, it has its moments of instability, but it felt manageable.”
Accessing those moments didn’t always work the same way, mind. Take Pure Ecstasy’s title track, for instance, which is bloodcurdling in places, buoyant in others, but massive-sounding throughout. One of the first songs written for the record, the song Pure Ecstasy was co-written with Periphery guitarist Misha Mansoor, “one of the most brilliant musicians alive”, having set out to create the ultimate opening track – for an album and a show.
In fact, they went as far as visualising a gig in a stadium, to help them imagine the kind of song that would grab the attention from the off in such a capacious venue. That there is another song on the record titled Stadiums is, it turns out, a coincidence. Rather than being about the perks of rocking enormodomes, it’s instead about Caleb using his career as an escape vehicle.
“I really believed success could help me run from who I am… like a fucking drug.”
If there was a role to be played, though, on Pure Ecstasy’s title-track, Caleb wanted to embody someone utterly confident and comfortable in their own skin, in the hope those qualities would seep into him and he’d begin to believe it. Listening to a lot of Prince and Metallica at the time helped; The Purple One and Papa Het have little in common as men and musicians, save for both being remarkably self-possessed.
“It was just talking some shit and exploring, thinking that maybe once in my life I could write from the perspective of believing I’m this powerful being,” says Caleb of the mindset. “And it unlocked something! It made this whole fucking mood – I’m singing in falsetto, exploring all these parts of my voice. The lyrics [for the title track] were just out there. They weren’t necessarily focused on a specific thing happening in my life, as much as they were expressing through words an energy I was feeling in my body.”
It’s unclear whether the lyrics Caleb refers to are the ones that have ended up on the final track. Despite musically sounding almost avant-garde in its discordance, the lyrics are less “out there” than suggested and more self-reverential – the first line, ‘Sick and disgusting, this aggressive disease’, name-checks multiple Beartooth releases.
Now that Caleb has reached this place, one wonders how difficult it must be for him to listen back to older material, those songs of self-hatred, self-doubt and mental turmoil, and hear how much he was suffering yet holding back.
Are there any that are difficult to listen back to in light of recent events?
“Many songs,” says Caleb, before reconsidering. So many songs… maybe all of them.”
“The song Disease hits so different now, really knowing what it was”
Last October, Beartooth were part of the bill at When We Were Young, Las Vegas’ annual celebration of pop-punk and emo music. The band played two sets across the weekend – one focused on the hits, the other more old-school and heavy. With so much material to cover, a rehearsal was necessary, though getting through it was easier said than done.
“The number of times during that fucking practice that I couldn’t sing the fucking songs… I was just bawling my fucking eyes out.”
Disease, the third single from Beartooth’s third album of the same name, comes in for special attention. It’s no surprise when you read back the lyrics ‘You think I’m strong but I just pretend’ and ‘Or will clarity become the cure for my disease?’
“Holy fuck… that song hits so different now, really knowing what it was.”
Meanwhile, there’s at least one piece of material Caleb can’t and won’t revisit in any capacity.
“I refuse to perform Sick And Disgusting. I do not listen to that song and I don’t recommend anyone else listens to that song,” he says of the song that features the lyrics ‘Dad, I don’t want to be sick and disgusting’ and recalls a religious upbringing at the hands of his preacher father. During one of his few recent interviews, on the Disrespectfully podcast, Caleb told his friends, hosts Katie Maloney and Dayna Kathan, that he’d been brought up to believe being gay is “a sickness you can cure with prayer.”
Thankfully, in stark contrast, there are tracks that Caleb can draw a positive direct line from in charting the point he has arrived at today.
“I really try to look back on Riptide as beautiful,” he says of one of the highlights from Beartooth’s previous album, 2023’s The Surface. “It was that familiar idea of blind empowerment, where I’m just like, ‘Fuck everything, I’m going to chase self-love’. I didn’t know what that meant, but I wanted to figure it out. And suddenly I was in dramatically different shape, with all these girl dancers [in the promo video], with bright colours and all this feminine-inspired music.
“The art leads to the truth.”
Let’s make one thing clear: Caleb Shomo doesn’t give a shit if you go into listening to Pure Ecstasy knowing what it’s about or not. It’s still a Beartooth record, first and foremost, with all the hallmarks you’ve come to expect – namely that it’s heavy and deals with its author’s inner emotional life. Nothing has changed in that regard. Its context is important to Caleb, but if you’re a new listener or you’ve somehow missed the recent headlines, that’s absolutely fine with him.
If you listen to the track Bullshit, for instance, written during a solo trip to Joshua Tree and “addressing things in the most old school Beartooth way possible”, and come away thinking it’s simply a song about calling out your own nonsense, then that’s okay.
“I just hope they understand that it was as honest and vulnerable as that artist could be at that period of time,” says Caleb of Pure Ecstasy. “I don’t think I've ever been more successful in achieving that honesty than I have on this record, as it all comes together so perfectly, in my opinion, to explain exactly where I was at that moment in time, around January-February 2026. I’m very proud of that time stamp.”
The thing is, though, doing surface level reads might work for some of these songs, but there are others so unmistakable in their aims, and so nakedly poignant, it would be doing them a disservice to hear them as anything other than what they are. Beautiful Again is one such song. Written from scratch with Jordan, Caleb admits it’s the hardest to revisit now and listening to lyrics like ‘’Cause I feel better in the dark / Hate can’t fix a broken heart’ it’s easy to see why.
“It’s exploring the tools I was trying to use to understand myself emotionally and to be okay with myself,” Caleb says of Beautiful Again. “I just torture myself over and over and I am so awful to myself – the way I view myself, the way I treat my myself. All I want is to be beautiful to myself, to people around me, but really to myself. I’ve never once looked at myself and thought, ‘That’s a beautiful person – inside, outside, in any capacity. On songs like Might Love Myself [from The Surface], I’ve tried to manifest it, and I’ve had some periods better than others. It’s saying, ‘This is fucking bullshit! You are not this beautiful, empowered person – you are just a fucking mess.”
“I don’t think I've ever been more successful in achieving honesty than I have on this record”
To hear someone speak about themselves in these terms, audibly exhausted from so many years of feeling that way, stops one in their tracks and stings the eyes. Especially when you consider how many of us hold ourselves in similar disregard.
“So many people do this to themselves constantly,” reasons Caleb. “Thinking that one day you’re going to look at yourself in the mirror and think, ‘Oh, I’m finally beautiful’. It’s just so fucking unhealthy and painful and this really vicious cycle. I was just dead in the middle of making this record.”
But Caleb, thank goodness, is still with us – and though he might not think so, what he’s done on Pure Ecstasy, for himself and for others, makes him truly beautiful. In living his truth, and chronicling that journey for those who want or need to experience the record on that level, and an absolutely kickass record for those who don’t, is a win for everybody.
“I feel like I have done my job,” he acknowledges. “I am just going to try to do my best to experience this amazing blessing that I have, being able to make a living off of being in a band and do my favourite thing in the world, which is to write songs about what I’m going through. And then to use those songs to explore my abilities as an entertainer, and to feel that amazing feeling with the crowd, is a really big gift.”
So, too, according to Caleb, is revisiting Beartooth’s back catalogue in light of the newest chapter in his life.
“It will probably give a very different listening experience to anyone listening though all of it, because it was all there from day one,” he suggests, intriguingly. “You’re watching me experience my life in real time – of being miserable and not allowing myself to understand why, to exploration, to empowerment, to all the fucking walls crumbling, and now dealing with the aftermath.”
He’s not wrong. And what a story it’s been.
Beartooth's new album Pure Ecstasy is out August 28 via Fearless. Get your vinyl copy with hand-signed insert now.
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