Beartooth | PURE ECSTASY Review

by Griff Stevens

How can a heavy band expand its musical vocabulary without losing the identity that makes its songs feel like its own? On Pure Ecstasy, Beartooth answers by making contrast part of the songwriting itself. Metalcore aggression, electronic production, hard-rock melody, industrial rhythms, nu-metal textures, and pop-sized hooks do not simply take turns appearing. The movement between them helps define the songs’ forms.

That distinction matters. A record can become stylistically broader simply by collecting more sounds. Beartooth instead coordinates changes in vocal delivery, rhythmic feel, guitar articulation, harmonic color, and production density. When one element changes, several others often move with it. Stylistic contrast becomes structural information: it tells us where a song has been, when it has crossed into another section, and how forcefully that new section should land.

The expanded palette accompanies an expanded creative process. Pure Ecstasy, Beartooth’s sixth studio album and first for Fearless Records, finds Caleb Shomo working extensively with producer and songwriter Jordan Fish while the performing band participates more directly in the recording. Connor Denis plays drums throughout the album, alongside bassist/vocalist Oshie Bichar and guitarists Zach Huston and Will Deely. Rather than erase the identity Shomo has established around Beartooth, the broader process gives that identity more variables to manipulate.

“Eyes Closed” provides an especially clear example. A tight guitar sound emphasizes pick attack while the bass adds mass and Denis’s drums retain definition underneath. Shomo announces himself with a scream before the verse settles into short, rhythmically active phrases. Guitar and voice participate in the same staccato character, while the harmony carries a dark Phrygian color.

Keyboards enter in the pre-chorus and smooth the rhythmic surface, preparing a chorus whose melodic shape gives Shomo room to reveal another side of his voice. An ascending gesture stretches into a sustained upper-register note. The transition feels large because Beartooth changes several things at once: articulation, texture, vocal technique, and melodic behavior.

The contrasting section reverses that movement. Syncopated bass and drums increase the rhythmic aggression as Shomo moves through guttural sounds, screams, and talk-singing. The song does not feels as though it has abandoned itself for another genre. The same materials continue to circulate. Even the opening scream becomes a recurring formal marker, returning around transitions and connecting sections with radically different densities.

Near the end, an exposed “Now I’m dying alone with my eyes closed” briefly clears the space before the chorus returns with additional vocal interaction. The arrangement then compresses familiar gestures from earlier sections into something resembling a miniature recap. A descending guitar figure supplies the final punctuation. Instead of merely repeating the chorus until the song stops, Beartooth uses the ending to remind us of the different musical states that got us there.

“Bullshit” pushes the electronic component further. Swirling synths and a techno-like pulse establish an industrial atmosphere, but the production does not divide neatly into electronic and metal sections. Synth, guitar, percussion, and voice contribute to a shared rhythmic architecture.

Shomo is central to making those transitions convincing. He can begin a melodic passage low in his range with a connected hard-rock delivery, increase the intensity phrase by phrase, and turn the destination into a sustained growling scream. His voice therefore carries form as well as emotion. We hear not only increasing aggression but the trajectory of the section itself.

The chorus enlarges the synth-and-guitar mass while retaining an unusually percussive quality. Flattened-second color and tritone tension keep the melodic accessibility from softening the track’s edge. Later, “I’m sick of myself, I’ve got to admit” becomes a launch point into another feel change. Pedal tones and increasingly percussive synths rebuild the environment around Shomo before stacked harmonies and ascending repetitions of “I’m sick” turn the voice itself into the arrangement’s primary intensifier.

“Free” is an important test because its balance moves farther toward processed melody and nu-metal-inflected accessibility. An arpeggiated texture and driving sixteenth-note guitar figure establish the foundation while Shomo answers with a sweeter, more connected vocal tone. The contrast is immediate, but again it exists inside the composition rather than being pasted onto it.

The chorus is unapologetically catchy. Guitar, synth, and drums remain distinct without sacrificing the collective impact of the groove, and Shomo’s repeated “I’m free” gives the song an uncomplicated melodic center. What keeps the repetition from becoming static is the way Beartooth alters the route around it. Subsequent passes add guitar hits and vocal embellishments; portions of the melody rise by an octave, and the buildup into the refrain takes a different melodic path.

The contrasting section begins with a harmonic lift before chunky guitars start answering the sweeter material. Shomo increasingly uses scream-singing as the response until a shouted “I’m free” announces another structural turn and the band drops into the breakdown.

That moment gets to the heart of Pure Ecstasy. Melody does not have to disappear for heaviness to return, nor does heaviness have to remain constant for Beartooth to retain its character. The song establishes identity through the relationship between those conditions.

The title track makes that relationship even more explicit. Palm-muted eighth-note guitar supports Shomo’s speak-singing with an industrial, slightly grungy weight. His delivery moves readily between conventional singing and considerably more aggressive scream-singing, while the chorus changes the temperature again, sweetening his tone as the melody becomes more immediate.

A move into half-time transforms the scale of the groove, and Shomo repeatedly delivers “I’m not the battle, I’m the fucking war” with a scream-sung attack. The moment works because the arrangement enlarges the lyric. It is not simply a more aggressive line placed over the same accompaniment. Rhythmic feel, vocal technique, and instrumental weight combine to create a different musical state.

Later repetitions develop the idea further. Small scream-sung responses trail the ends of lead phrases, their overlapping entrances propelling one line into the next. Added synthesizers alter the texture before a swell unexpectedly strips away the accumulated weight. What remains sounds almost like an intimate demo: strummed guitar beneath Shomo’s comparatively exposed voice.

The distance between that moment and the highly produced music surrounding it is enormous, yet the transition feels earned. That may be the clearest demonstration of what Pure Ecstasy understands about stylistic expansion.

Its metal, grunge, pop, electronic, industrial, and nu-metal characteristics matter less as genre labels than as materials Beartooth can put to work. Shomo’s melodic singing, speak-singing, screams, and gutturals operate the same way. Denis’s drumming helps articulate changes in rhythmic scale, while guitars, bass, synth layers, vocal stacks, and shifts in density continually redefine the musical environment without severing one section from another.

For a heavy band expanding its vocabulary, finding new sounds is only half the problem. The harder question is finding a musical reason for those sounds to coexist. Pure Ecstasy finds that reason in form. Beartooth makes contrast structural, turning sweetness and aggression, electronic precision and physical heaviness, melody and abrasion into different states of the same songwriting language. The album can therefore push those states farther apart without losing the thread connecting them.

Artist: Beartooth

Album: Pure Ecstasy

Label: Fearless Records

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Release Date: August 28, 2026