For much of Beartooth’s existence, the band functioned as a direct extension of Caleb Shomo’s crises. Anxiety, self-destruction, anger and self-loathing were not merely recurring subjects but part of the mechanism that made the music work. Even as the band began moving away from the almost claustrophobic rawness of Disgusting and progressively expanded its vocabulary toward far more accessible hard rock, there remained a sense that Shomo needed to write those songs to survive something. The Surface considerably altered that relationship by introducing optimism and recovery into a language built around suffering for years. Pure Ecstasy, the band’s sixth album and first for Fearless Records, takes that transformation somewhere even more complicated because it no longer simply discusses learning how to be okay: it documents Shomo discovering fundamental aspects of his own identity while the life he knew began falling apart.
The personal context is inseparable from these eleven songs. Shomo has explained that writing the album became part of the process that eventually led him to publicly identify as a gay man, while “Free,” written with Jordan Fish, emerged during a period in which his fourteen-year marriage was also ending. That information inevitably changes how Pure Ecstasy is heard, although reducing the album to a statement about sexuality would ignore the more interesting conflict inside it. The freedom Shomo describes carries consequences, contradictions and considerable pain, and the music attempts to represent both the relief of no longer hiding and the destruction that can accompany such a transformation.
That duality produces a considerably less stable album than The Surface. Beartooth retains the enormous riffs, breakdowns and choruses designed for thousands of people to sing together, but around them appear pop, electronics, rhythms approaching hip-hop, processed vocals and arrangements that occasionally seem to belong to a different band. Jordan Fish and Misha Mansoor are among the album’s creative collaborators, while Beartooth’s own members participate more extensively in a process historically dominated almost entirely by Shomo. The result substantially expands the sonic surface without guaranteeing that every possibility becomes part of an equally convincing language.
The title track establishes that tension effectively. “Pure Ecstasy” begins with unusual restraint before allowing the guitars and vocals to acquire greater scale, preserving enough abrasion for the modern production not to erase its emotional weight. “Eyes Closed” continues from a more immediate position and demonstrates that Beartooth can still construct one of those enormous choruses without reproducing the exact formula of previous records. The production shines, but there is enough movement underneath the melodies to prevent the song from becoming straightforward arena rock.
“Bullshit” makes even better use of the relationship between both sides. The riff carries the weight many listeners will immediately associate with Beartooth, while the chorus clearly belongs to the contemporary version of a band that no longer has any hesitation about approaching pop. The combination works because neither side appears to apologize for the other. Heaviness does not arrive as a concession intended to prove that Beartooth can still sound aggressive, while melody does not need to be justified by immediately placing a breakdown behind it.
That natural relationship does not survive throughout the entire album. Pure Ecstasy wants to explore so many possibilities that it occasionally mistakes creative freedom for accumulation, and “Stadiums” concentrates much of that problem. The song introduces shifts in texture, samples, piano, industrial elements, an almost theatrical development and instrumentation that occasionally possesses considerable force, but all of those ideas compete to define a composition that never finds a sufficiently strong center. The experiment has value precisely because Beartooth is attempting to escape certain expectations, although accepting that intention does not require considering the result successful. There is a difference between a song that feels uncomfortable because it breaks convention and one whose structure simply cannot organize the ideas it contains, and “Stadiums” comes too close to the latter.
The inconsistency is especially interesting because Pure Ecstasy contains some of the most aggressive riffs Beartooth has recorded recently. The band is not abandoning metalcore to become a pop act, as a superficial listen to certain singles might suggest, but attempting to place both extremes inside the same identity. That decision produces genuinely exciting contrasts when the arrangements have enough room to breathe, while elsewhere it generates songs where the breakdown seems to belong to one composition and the chorus to another.
“Free” occupies the emotional center of the album and probably explains its shift in priorities better than any other song. Shomo wrote it while beginning to confront his identity directly and has identified the song as a catalyst within the personal process surrounding the record. The importance of that moment can clearly be heard in his performance, although the song also exposes one of the weaknesses running throughout Pure Ecstasy: when Shomo attempts to express something especially significant, his lyrics tend to become extremely literal.
Directness has always been part of Beartooth. Even on Disgusting, Shomo rarely concealed his emotions behind particularly complicated metaphors, although the violence of the language and dirtiness of those recordings created an almost unpleasant sense of intimacy. On Pure Ecstasy, that straightforward writing coexists with much larger production and choruses built around simple declarations, causing some phrases to acquire the quality of slogans rather than confessions. The problem is not that Shomo writes about acceptance or happiness, but that a personal transformation this complicated could have produced considerably more specific observations about desire, guilt, fear, loss and reconstruction.
Whenever that specificity appears, the album gains depth. “Lose You To Find Me” discovers an idea particularly appropriate to the entire journey because it recognizes that discovering who you are can involve losing relationships, certainties and previous versions of yourself. The melody is accessible and the production openly approaches turn-of-the-century alternative rock, but that musical lightness coexists with an emotional idea that avoids presenting liberation as an entirely clean experience.
“You” takes that openness somewhere different, playing with a more provocative vocal performance and a structure that moves between sensuality, melody and heaviness. Some decisions may feel exaggerated, but the song has enough personality to justify the risk and allows Shomo to explore a different relationship with his own voice. For years, his two most recognizable tools were the torn scream and the enormous melodic chorus; here he begins using intermediate registers that can sound strange precisely because Beartooth had never created much room for them.
Production contributes both to that expansion and to several of the record’s problems. There is an enormous amount of detail, and the low end retains enough force to keep the guitars from disappearing behind the electronics, but the vocal treatment can become excessive. Shomo possesses a sufficiently recognizable voice that it does not require so many layers, filters and effects, and certain passages lose intimacy precisely when the lyrics are attempting to become more personal. The paradox is clear: Pure Ecstasy wants to be the most open Beartooth album while occasionally placing more processing than ever between the singer and the listener.
The rest of the band helps prevent that transformation from becoming merely a production experiment. Zach Huston, Will Deely, Oshie Bichar and Connor Denis participate in a version of Beartooth that is beginning to feel less like Shomo’s studio project accompanied by musicians and more like a lineup with its own creative possibilities. Denis is particularly important because his drums can move from direct patterns into far more restless arrangements without losing impact, while the guitars preserve enough dirt to remind us that underneath all the stylistic expansion there remains a band built around riffs.
The search for accessibility begins to flatten the second half, however. “Sorry” contains interesting rhythmic ideas and aggression that contrasts with its introduction, but the chorus lacks the same personality. “For Me By Me” continues the discourse of independence through an efficient structure that is less memorable than the meaning it attempts to communicate, while “I Made It” takes the logic of overcoming adversity toward a deliberately bright conclusion. The final track has a clear narrative purpose because it completes the movement from uncertainty and conflict toward acceptance, although musically it approaches the grand victory anthem so closely that it loses some of the friction that made the first two-thirds of the album interesting.
That distinction between personal importance and musical effectiveness runs throughout Pure Ecstasy. It is possible to understand exactly why a song needed to exist for Shomo while simultaneously recognizing that its finished form is not among Beartooth’s strongest compositions. Confusing those two ideas would mean treating autobiographical honesty as an automatic guarantee of quality, when the work of transforming private experience into music consists precisely of finding a form capable of communicating something beyond an explanation of what happened.
In that sense, the album is more fascinating for what it attempts than for the consistency with which it succeeds. Beartooth could have used the success of The Surface to continue perfecting a commercially effective combination of metalcore, hard rock and enormous choruses, but Shomo appears far less interested in protecting that position than in discovering what he can do now that a substantial part of his personal identity is no longer being repressed. That freedom introduces questionable decisions and songs likely to divide even listeners who have followed the band for years, but it also prevents the experience from becoming another carefully calculated iteration of an established formula.
The comparison with early Beartooth is revealing because the change involves more than moving from darkness toward happiness. Shomo continues writing from conflict, although that conflict now comes from accepting a truth and confronting its consequences rather than attempting to survive a mind that seemed intent on destroying him. The anger remains and the screams retain credibility, but they no longer function exclusively as expressions of self-hatred. Sometimes they are directed toward external expectations, elsewhere toward broken relationships, while other moments make them feel like part of an attempt to shed an earlier version of himself.
Musically, Beartooth is still searching for a way to represent that new complexity. Metalcore offers a perfect grammar for anger and catharsis, while pop provides an immediate path toward celebration, but Pure Ecstasy needs to coexist with emotions that do not belong entirely to either extreme. Its strongest songs emerge when both languages are allowed to contaminate each other, while the less convincing material seems to move from one to the other through production decisions that have not yet become completely organic.
For that reason, asking the next album simply to become heavier would miss the point. The weaker moments of Pure Ecstasy do not exist because Beartooth has become too pop-oriented, but because the band is still learning how to integrate a much broader palette without losing cohesion. “Stadiums” could have remained equally problematic with guitars three times heavier, while “Lose You To Find Me” demonstrates that an openly accessible song can work when melody, lyric and arrangement are moving in the same direction.
Shomo’s evolution as a singer also makes a complete retreat difficult to imagine. His clean voice now possesses enough confidence to sustain entire songs and his screams remain abrasive enough to create contrast, while the new registers appearing throughout Pure Ecstasy suggest that he is only beginning to discover what he can do with that freedom. The next stage should involve less accumulation of resources and more confidence in deciding which ones are actually necessary.
Across its 38 minutes and eleven songs, Pure Ecstasy documents that search without attempting to hide the seams. There are moments where Beartooth appears to have discovered a substantially broader version of itself and others where the experimentation sounds like a collection of ideas still waiting for a common syntax. That unevenness prevents the album from achieving the consistency of the band’s strongest work, but it also makes it considerably more interesting than another safe iteration of a formula Beartooth already knows how to execute.
