Beartooth - Pure Ecstasy
There has always been an unmistakable catharsis at the heart of Beartooth. Since Caleb Shomo began turning the frustrations, anxieties, and darker corners of his life into music from his Ohio basement, the band has built its reputation on making pain feel enormous. Six albums into that journey, Pure Ecstasy finds Beartooth looking at that pain from a different perspective. The darkness is still there, but so is the light—and the tension between the two makes this their most revealing record yet.
Set to be released on August 28, 2026, through Fearless Records, Pure Ecstasy is the band's first album for the label and a significant step forward creatively. Across eleven tracks, Shomo explores the chaos and clarity that can accompany personal growth, delivering an album that remains unmistakably Beartooth while pushing well beyond the boundaries of the band's established formula.
The title track is a fitting way to begin. From its opening moments, “Pure Ecstasy” is disorienting, aggressive, and massive, immediately throwing the listener into the emotional extremes that define the band's latest album. The song originated with Shomo and Periphery's Misha Mansoor before being expanded with music producer Jordan Fish, and that collaboration is evident in the sheer weight of the production. The riffs hit with brutal force, while the layers of sound give the track an almost overwhelming sense of scale.
“Eyes Closed” immediately keeps that momentum going, pairing monstrous riffs with some of Shomo's most vulnerable vocals. Written with Fish, the song captures the feeling of having life change so quickly that there is no time to prepare for what comes next. Rather than pretending to have all the answers, Shomo embraces the uncertainty and screams his way through it.
That combination of vulnerability and sheer heaviness becomes one of Pure Ecstasy's defining strengths. The three tracks that follow, “Bullshit,” “Beautiful Again,” and “Stadiums,” demonstrate that Beartooth hasn't abandoned the arena-sized hooks and crushing guitar work that have helped make the band one of modern heavy music's biggest success stories. Instead, those familiar elements are being used as a foundation for something much more expansive.
“Free” is arguably the album's emotional centrepiece. Released as the album's lead single, the song represents a major turning point for Shomo, moving beyond simply surviving difficult moments of his life and toward the possibility of actually feeling liberated from them. Its towering chorus and seismic production give it the kind of scale that can fill an arena, but its real impact comes from how personal it feels.
Shomo has described “Free” as the most honest depiction of his soul he will likely ever make, and that honesty is impossible to miss. The song acknowledges that fear and joy can coexist, sometimes within the same day, and that emotional complexity makes the track feel less like a conventional victory anthem and more like an honest snapshot of someone finally allowing themselves to experience life without constantly fighting it.
Fish's presence throughout the album plays an important role in that evolution. Known for his work with Bring Me The Horizon, Poppy, Architects, and many others, Fish pushes Beartooth into more adventurous sonic territory without stripping away the band's identity. The production feels larger and more dynamic, giving the songs room to move between crushing heaviness, enormous melodic passages, and moments of vulnerability.
This is where the tracks “Sorry,” “Lose You To Find Me,” and “You” continue that emotional excavation, while “For Me By Me” feels particularly fitting within the album's larger theme of self-discovery. There is a sense throughout Pure Ecstasy that Shomo is no longer simply documenting the struggle. He's examining what comes after it as well.
“Made It,” the album's closing track, brings that journey to an appropriately reflective conclusion. After spending much of the record confronting fear, uncertainty, anger, and vulnerability, the closing moments feel less like a declaration that everything is perfect and more like an acknowledgment that simply making it through is an achievement in itself.
Another major change comes from the collaborative nature of the recording. For the first time on a Beartooth album, Shomo doesn't perform every instrument himself, with drummer Connor Denis playing drums across the record during the sessions at NRG Recording Studios. Bassist Oshie Bichar and guitarists Zach Huston and Will Deely also take on larger roles, reflecting how the band's formidable live lineup has increasingly become part of its creative identity.
Early songwriting contributions from Skyler Accord also helped shape the record, further emphasizing that Pure Ecstasy is a more collaborative Beartooth album than its predecessors. Rather than diminishing Shomo's creative voice, those additional perspectives seem to have given him the freedom to explore sides of himself that might not have emerged otherwise.
Following the commercial success of 2023's The Surface, which produced the number one rock radio hits “Might Love Myself” and “I Was Alive,” Pure Ecstasy could have easily been an opportunity to simply repeat a winning formula. Instead, Beartooth chooses evolution. The hooks are bigger, the production is more ambitious, and the emotional palette is broader.
Most importantly, Pure Ecstasy doesn't confuse growth with abandoning what made Beartooth compelling in the first place. The screams still sound like they could tear through concrete. The riffs still hit with enough force to inspire a mosh pit. The choruses are still built for thousands of voices. But underneath all of that is a greater willingness to be vulnerable.
For years, Beartooth made music about fighting through the darkness. Pure Ecstasy is about discovering what might exist once you finally reach the other side.
It isn't an album about achieving perfect peace. It's about freedom, uncertainty, joy, fear, and accepting that all of those things can exist simultaneously. In that sense, Pure Ecstasy may be Beartooth's most mature album yet—not because it is their least aggressive, but because its aggression now feels like one part of a much larger emotional picture.
However, Beartooth hasn't stopped fighting. They've simply discovered that there might be something worth fighting for on the other side.
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