BEARTOOTH frontman Caleb Shomo has spoken to The Break Down With Nath & Johnny about the response to his coming out as a gay man in May 2026, three months before "Pure Ecstasy" arrived.
He was asked whether he had anticipated the reaction. Most of it, he said, came before the announcement — from February 2026 onward, when "Free" was released and he had decided to stop managing how he presented himself. "I had already decided, like, I'm not gonna water myself down at all. I'm gonna wear what I wanna wear. I'm gonna sing how I wanna sing. I'm gonna look how I wanna look," he said. "And that was met with a lot of opposition and a lot of... I mean, really, just a lot of homophobia, and a lot of people who really were not okay with me presenting that way at all. And it was just kind of sad, I guess, is probably the only way to put it."
He got off the internet and kept working. BEARTOOTH were in the middle of the biggest tour of their career — direct support to BAD OMENS in sold-out arenas, PRESIDENT opening. "It was tough. It was a tough tour," he said. "A lot of the day I'd be spent in a really, really bad place and just trying to find enough energy and enough will to get myself warmed up and get on that stage and do my fucking job."
The album nearly went a different way. Shomo spent about a year writing what he now describes as deliberate evasion. "I kept wanting to just write very broad and nonspecific lyrics trying to capture an emotion of some kind," he said. "The truth was I was just afraid. And I knew what I should write the record about."
Co-producer Jordan Fish ended that. Fish heard the whole body of work and called back weeks later. "He's, like, 'This is super cool and really, really creative. But this is not a BEARTOOTH record. What a BEARTOOTH record is, is you taking a really hard and honest inward look about the things you're struggling with... and you're just not doing that with any of this stuff,'" Shomo recalled. "'I can tell you from experience, you're going to regret this in the long run.'"
They wrote "Free" that day. Fish came back to the States and, within forty-eight hours, "Beautiful Again" and "Eyes Closed" were done, followed by "Lose You To Find Me". The rest was rewritten over three weeks of early-morning Zoom calls to England.
Shomo's decision to come out publicly followed the record rather than preceded it. "I just felt like I wanted to address what was going on before it got addressed for me. And that was that."
"Pure Ecstasy" was released August 28 via Fearless Records. The world tour opens September 17 in Europe; the North American leg starts November 11 in Boston.