Eleven steps from one end of the scale to the other, thirty-eight minutes to take them, and not one step allowed to stop in the middle. That is the whole design of Pure Ecstasy, and the singer laid it out himself.
You start with the darkest, heaviest song on the record, sonically, and then you end with the poppiest, brightest song. It's that ultimate separation of emotions, with no middle ground, that I was trying to convey.
Caleb Shomo, NME, 27 August 2026
The metalcore five-piece out of Ohio, Beartooth, put out its sixth album on 28 August 2026, the first on Fearless Records and the first since The Surface in 2023, co-produced across most of its length by Shomo and Jordan Fish with Misha Mansoor of Periphery on the title track, and it opens by smashing the first flask on the bench before you have your goggles on. No warm-up.
Some context first. In May he came out as gay, and these songs deal with that and with his mental health, heading toward accepting himself. He told Rock Sound on 20 August 2026 that the band had "stripped away so much of my personal fears" to make it. That is his story. It sits under every track here.
It is also a band record now. Zach Huston and Will Deely on guitars, Oshie Bichar on bass and vocals, Connor Denis on drums. Shomo is not playing every part himself anymore, and you can hear more hands on the glassware.
Two reagents, one flask
Picture a chemistry lab, because that is how this thing is built. Two reagents that are not supposed to share a beaker: the metalcore this band has always run on, and a glossy, bright pop that Shomo, in the same NME interview, traced back to soul, to Al Green, Aretha Franklin and Prince, with thrash and Metallica records on the other burner. Fish measures. The band pours. Every song, you find out whether the mix holds or foams over the rim.
The title track is the acid at the bottom of the scale, the darkest and heaviest thing on the record by the singer's own account, a riff poured from the brown bottle with the skull on the label that eats straight through the bench, the tiles and the floor below before Shomo has finished his first scream. Right way in. No argument.
"Eyes Closed" is the first reaction that proves the idea works. A riff that is heavy and melodic at the same time, a hook sitting on top of it, and neither one curdling the other. "B******t" is the heavier, catchier one, the song built for a floor full of bodies going headlong at each other. Those two are the pit's share of the record, and they are good.
Then the colour starts to change. "Beautiful Again" is pure early-2000s pop rock with a metalcore band standing behind it, and it is one of the most affecting songs here. "Free", the lead single, is the emotional centre of the record. It took heat when it came out. It deserves none of it.
"Sorry" is the clever one: a club beat sitting in the beaker, clear and harmless, until the guitars drop in like a catalyst and the whole solution boils in a single salvo. "Lose You To Find Me" is the catchiest song here, a vocal run that belongs on pop radio, and it works because Shomo can actually sing it.
That is the thing holding all of this together. His voice. He goes from a real scream to a clean falsetto and back without the join showing, and on any honest reading he is the best thing on the record. Every swing on this album goes through his throat first, and he never drops one.
No buffer in the flask
The fault is built into the design, and Shomo designed it. Run a titration with no buffer in the flask and the colour never settles, flipping from acid to alkali and back with every drop, the paper never resting on a shade you could hold up to the light, and that is the ride these eleven songs give you front to back, lurch after lurch, the heavy tracks and the bright ones shoved against each other with nothing to cushion the join. Song by song, that is thrilling. In one sitting, the joins start to show.
"You" is where you feel it most. It pulls hard the other way, all aggression, a song built for the live set, and it lands in the back half like a drop of the acid from track one spilled across a finished experiment. Good song. Wrong shelf.
Song by song, the reactions hold, and front to back nothing buffers the swing.
Then "I Made It" closes it at the far end of the scale, the brightest and poppiest song on the record exactly as Shomo planned, the paper turned all the way over to the other colour, every trace of that opening acid gone. It is a proper finish. It sounds like somebody arriving.
Pure Ecstasy is a good, uneven record, where most of the songs are stronger than the sequence joining them. Come for the pit and you get the first three tracks and "You". Come ready for a hook and you get the rest. Play the first track and then the last. Everything this band has to say this year lives between those two.