Beartooth singer Caleb Shomo on coming out before the album Pure Ecstasy

Caleb Shomo spoke to NME about coming out publicly and about what it did to the record he was making at the time. The Beartooth frontman said the decision gave him peace of mind, and that the album, Pure Ecstasy, could not honestly have been about anything else.

The timing was not entirely his. He took himself offline in February after homophobic comments about his appearance in the video for lead single Free, then returned to announce the album and UK headline shows, and shared a statement describing himself as a proudly gay man. He told NME he realised it was going to get out one way or another and wanted to say it on his own terms.

He was clear that the choice was for himself rather than for an audience. He said he had been open with people close to him for a long time, that the religious background he grew up in and a long marriage made it more complicated than it might have looked, and that it simply felt like time.

Jordan Fish, formerly of Bring Me The Horizon, co-wrote and produced parts of the album, and Shomo credits him with lowering the barrier. He said Fish reminded him what Beartooth is from a fan's perspective, and helped him feel less afraid of talking about what he was going through.

The music moved too. Shomo said he had been listening to soul, naming Al Green and Aretha Franklin, and that Prince was one of the biggest influences on the record, while thrash and Metallica shaped the riffs. The album opens with its heaviest song and ends with its brightest, which he described as deliberate separation with no middle ground.

Performing the older catalogue has been harder than writing the new one. Rehearsing for the first shows after coming out, he broke down during Disease and had the same trouble with Might Love Myself and Riptide, songs written from a place he had not yet been able to name. Pure Ecstasy arrived August 28 through Fearless Records, the band's first for the label, joining a busy autumn of metal releases on the release calendar alongside Louder Than Life setting out its September running order and Inkcarceration announcing a 2027 return to the Ohio State Reformatory.