“I am a proud gay man.” These were the words that shook the hyper masculine metal world back in May, when the frontman of metalcore band Beartooth, Caleb Shomo, came out after 13 years of marriage.
Since they began in the 2010s, the Ohio group united audiences with their anthems of alienation and vulnerability. From their earliest tracks like ‘Beaten In Lips’ and ‘Hated’, Beartooth traded in themes of entrapment, escape, emotional numbness and the hope of overcoming the odds against.
Raised in a strict religious household where Shomo’s father (and his father before him) was a church pastor, Beartooth songs appeared to unpick the knots of his childhood. As he wrote in his coming out Instagram post, “There are four very self-deprecating albums about exploring my religious upbringing, depression, self-hatred, self-loathing and hopelessness.” Shomo became a sort of patron saint of self-abasement: exposing his vulnerabilities on the altar of rock.
But things began to shift on 2023’s The Surface, which revealed further layers the singer was working through. With the song ‘Riptide’ – the first song he composed after getting sober – he questioned the cycle of “depression-song-writing-catharsis.” “It’s the last time I romanticise/ Yhe riptide that’s trying to drown me,” he sang with a new clarity.
“I think you can draw a pretty direct path from that song to where I’m at now in my life and music,” Shomo says today over Zoom. “I vowed never to make something as dark as (that album) ever again. It was a brutal process.” Dressed in a simple coal grey T-shirt, his famous wild barnet now cut neatly into a side parting, he looks relaxed and healthy. A blood red manicure hinting at his newfound freedom. But the road has been a rocky one: “I wanted to understand why I’ve written all of these self-deprecating, fucking sad albums and why I’ve decided that’s just who I am.”
Unpacking these layers of his songwriting meant unpacking more layers of himself. Today he describes each Beartooth album as “basically a diary entry.” Pure Ecstasy began as an 18 tracker, thematically looking at impersonal concepts of empowerment. “The truth was it wasn’t a Beartooth record.”
A conversation about the state of his life, including his sexuality, with producer Jordan Fish (Evanescene, Poppy) resulted in the song ‘Free’, which peeks out from the precipice into a potentially emancipated future. “It was the first song I ever wrote addressing why I’ve felt this way for so long and the truth about my sexuality.” The process unlocked something in him. “I hit a wall: I thought I can either stare this reality in the face and understand I need to embrace this, if I’m ever going to deal with this internal hatred issue.” The session ended in him re-writing the lyrics of the whole album.
Pure Ecstasy careens between raw aggression and Y2K pop nous, influenced by early Metallica, ‘peak’ era Prince and Max Martin-penned pop anthems of N*Sync and The Backstreet Boys. On the gnarly ‘Eyes Closed’, he’s on the tightrope walk of life (he’s “running out of ways to hold it all together”); on the Korn-esque ‘Bullshit’ he confesses that he’s “sick of myself”; and on the powerful emo-singalong ‘Beautiful Again’, he confronts the ghost of his self-loathing. After the heaviness, closer ‘Made It’ offers a gorgeous touch of lightness. A synth-heavy bop, it starts with a spoken word part with Shomo asking himself: “Am I ever fucking just going to give up and love who I am or not?” He describes the latter as the song on the album that is emotionally closest to himself. “That song was really important to describe the duality of this record and my life at the time. Specifically, the elation of me discovering the source of self-hatred and reconciling with it, while simultaneously having the experience of my life falling apart.”
Another highlight is Stadiums – a sonic flick book looking at the way fame altered Shomo’s world (“Blowing up changed me/ Fuck them trying to cage me”). “It’s about using the chase for fame to run away from the truth,” he says. “I was lost, believing that this validation (from fans) would change who I was on the inside. Accepting success instead of reality.” A pre-song sample of ‘Little Richard’ being asked, presumably sarcastically, “Were you always so shy?” was included as a manifestation. “I was like, ‘I will create this song in the headspace of fearlessness and self-belief of my artistry.” While the middle section is inspired by his religious upbringing. “(Guitarist) Skyler Acord came in and laid down these church chords. My grandma is an amazing organ player, she had one in her house.”
He says he finds Hayley Williams, who recently explored her Southern Baptist upbringing on Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party, as remarkably inspiring. “There’s not many people who understand what it’s like going from being this highly religious child to then being a child in a van on the road chasing rock and roll,” he says. “A lot of things she has said hit me fucking hard and I appreciate her being so open about it, because it really does make me feel less crazy.”
In the Instagram post where he came out, Shomo pledged to “express myself wholeheartedly and fully”. But when the video for ‘Free’ dropped in the spring, featuring Schomo doing exactly that in his best Glam rock make up, crop-top jacket and gold top, he knew better than to read the reactions to the video online. “I learned to stay the fuck out of the comments,” he says. “People have a lot of strong feelings and opinions about sexuality in society.” He says that he was out to those closest to him in his life and his Instagram post was a declaration of selfhood just like his lyrics are.
Despite Pure Ecstasy feeling like Beartooth’s best work, he is feeling trepidatious before it’s released. “Candidly, something I’m struggling with is seeing how my coming out is affecting our band, our business,” he says. “I struggle with thinking maybe I fucked up. And maybe there’s another way I could have done this. It’s been really fucking scary. We’ve never really had any drama around our band ever.” And months before their tour starts, he is conscious of getting swallowed up by the online chatter. “There’s a lot of people who don’t give a fuck who I am and just want to listen to the songs and that feels very comforting to me. To feel that support on the road is completely opposite from what I am experiencing online,” he says. “If I never let myself get lost in what people think about myself as a person, that will just take away from the beauty of this thing.” And that would be a shame because Pure Ecstasy is more beautiful for its bravery and honesty.
Pure Ecstasy is out August 28 via Fearless.
