Beartooth have announced their sixth album, Pure Ecstasy, out 28 August via new label home Fearless Records, and released the album’s title track to mark the news.
Across 11 tracks, frontman Caleb Shomo pushes the band further than ever before, channelling both the chaos and the clarity of hard-won personal growth. The opening title track lays everything bare from the first note, a raw and disorienting entry point that sets the tone for a record built on confronting every high and low without flinching. “Song one is always a crucial part of an album to me. It’s gotta lock you into the vibe out of the gate,” Shomo explained. “‘Pure Ecstasy‘ was birthed in a studio with Misha Mansoor, ridiculous loudspeakers, and the dumbest heaviest chugs we could chug. Once it was brought home and expanded on with Jordan Fish, there was no question it was the album opener. Play loud and kick ass.”
The album follows the chart-dominating run of 2023’s The Surface, which debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Alternative and Hard Music charts and produced the No. 1 rock radio hits ‘Might Love Myself‘ and ‘I Was Alive‘. First single ‘Free‘, released earlier this year, opened this next chapter with towering hooks and radical self-examination. Shomo has called it “the most honest depiction of my soul I will most likely ever make.”
That honesty has been the foundation of Beartooth since the band emerged from Shomo’s Ohio basement in 2013, turning anxiety, depression, anger and self-destruction into cathartic anthems that have racked up over 1.3 billion streams. But Pure Ecstasy represents something different. Bigger and more collaborative than any previous record, it finds Shomo reaching for a new level of vulnerability, and for the first time he didn’t do it alone. Early songwriting contributions came from Skyler Accord, while working alongside Jordan Fish (ex-Bring Me The Horizon) cracked Shomo fully open. It is also the first Beartooth album where he didn’t perform every instrument himself, with drummer Connor Denis playing across the record.
Following a US arena run with Bad Omens, the band head out on a EU and UK headline tour this autumn, including O2 Academy Brixton on 3 October, O2 Academy Leeds on 5 October and Glasgow’s Barrowland Ballroom on 6 October.
For years Beartooth turned pain into anthems shouted back at the world. Pure Ecstasy, by Shomo’s own account, captures what happens on the other side of that fight, the possibility of freedom. On the strength of the title track, we think it might be their most fully realised record yet!
