Beartooth Pure Ecstasy Is Their First for Fearless Records

Beartooth performing at Rock am Ring.

Beartooth released Pure Ecstasy through Fearless Records, their sixth album, their first for that label and their first in three years.

It runs eleven songs across thirty-eight minutes, and for the first time the production credit is shared.

A Project Built on Doing It Alone

The band has always been effectively one person’s operation, with Caleb Shomo writing, performing and producing the records himself.

That is unusual in heavy music, where the band format is close to universal and the producer is normally an external figure.

Working alone gives complete control and removes the friction that produces compromise, which is why artists do it. It also removes the second opinion, which is why most eventually stop.

Bringing in a co-producer on album six is therefore a real change in method rather than a credit adjustment.

Jordan Fish in the Room

The co-producer is Jordan Fish, whose credits run through some of the most commercially successful heavy music of the last decade.

His background is in a band that moved deliberately from metalcore toward pop structure, which is precisely the territory this record is described as occupying.

Hiring someone who has already made that transition with another band is a pointed decision. It suggests the direction was chosen before the producer was.

First Album for a New Label

Moving to Fearless Records after five albums elsewhere is a structural change as well as a commercial one.

Label moves at this stage usually follow either a contract ending or a mismatch in ambition, and they reset the working relationships around an artist entirely.

A new label also means a new set of people arguing about singles, artwork and release timing, which is exactly the kind of friction a self-producing artist has historically avoided.

Three Years Between Records

Three years is a normal gap for a heavy band with a substantial touring commitment, and it is longer than this band’s earlier pace.

Longer gaps in this genre usually reflect touring cycles rather than writing difficulty, since the live circuit is where the income is.

It also allows a change of direction to be absorbed. An audience that has waited three years is more willing to accept a different record than one that expected it in eighteen months.

Eleven Songs, Thirty-Eight Minutes

The running time averages under three and a half minutes per track, which is standard for the genre and shorter than the current album norm.

Heavy music has largely resisted the streaming-driven expansion that pushed rap and pop albums past an hour, and the reason is structural.

Aggression does not sustain. A record built on intensity has a natural length, and past about forty minutes the listener stops registering it as intense.

Pop Songwriting Inside Heavy Music

Reviewers have consistently noted the pop craft underneath the heaviness, and that combination is the defining feature of the band’s recent work.

It is also the most contested thing about it. Audiences in heavy music are unusually attentive to perceived softening, and melodic choruses are the first thing that gets called out.

The defence is that the two are not opposed. A chorus that works is a chorus that works, and the genre’s best records have always had them.

What the Reviews Disagreed About

Response has been broadly positive with one recurring criticism: that the record lacks cohesion across its eleven tracks.

That is a common consequence of a producer change. Two people making decisions produce more variety than one, and variety and coherence pull against each other.

Whether it reads as range or as inconsistency depends largely on what a listener wanted from the record before hearing it.

Writing About Depression Without Repeating Yourself

The band’s catalogue has consistently addressed depression, and the difficulty at album six is finding a new position on the same subject.

Reviews describe this record as approaching the material from a different angle, with the darkness still present but no longer the only thing there.

That is a genuinely harder record to write. Despair has a clear emotional register; ambivalence does not.

Titles That State the Position

The tracklist is unusually direct: “Free”, “Sorry”, “You”, “I Made It”, and the title track itself.

One-word and short-phrase titles are characteristic of the genre, where the emotional content is meant to arrive immediately rather than through construction.

Closing an album about depression with a song called “I Made It” is not subtle, and it is not attempting to be.

Columbus and the Midwestern Scene

The band comes from Columbus, Ohio, which sits inside a midwestern heavy-music infrastructure that rarely gets written about.

That region has produced a disproportionate number of bands in this genre, sustained by an all-ages venue circuit and a touring geography that makes it cheap to reach several markets quickly.

Scenes like that do not generate coverage but they generate bands, which is the more useful output.

The Self-Producing Musician

Artists who record themselves entirely have become far more common as the tools have got cheaper, and the results split predictably.

The advantage is time. Somebody working in their own room can spend six months on a record without paying for a day of it, which allows a level of revision no studio budget permits.

The disadvantage is that nobody says no, and records made without that resistance frequently need an editor more than they need another idea.

Why Fearless Is a Sensible Home

The label has a long history in the melodic end of heavy music, with a roster built around bands that sit between hardcore and pop-punk.

That is a reasonable match for a record described as pushing heaviness and pop songwriting simultaneously.

Label fit matters more in this genre than in most, because the audience follows labels and treats them as a signal about what a band is.

A Late-August Release Date

The record arrived on one of the busiest release Fridays of the year for rock and metal, sharing the date with more than sixty other titles.

That crowding is a genuine cost for a mid-sized band, since coverage is finite and the largest names absorb most of it.

What it buys is the end of the festival season, when the audience is already engaged and the autumn touring calendar is about to open.

What a Co-Producer Actually Changes

The word producer covers several unrelated jobs, and which one is being described determines how much this credit matters.

At one end it means engineering: microphone choice, signal path, the technical business of capturing sound well. At the other it means editorial authority — deciding which song stays, whether the second verse is necessary, and whether the chorus arrives too late.

An artist who already engineers their own records is not hiring the first kind. They are hiring the second, which means voluntarily reintroducing an argument they had been winning by default for five albums.

That is why the credit reads as a change of method rather than a change of personnel. Somebody in the room is now allowed to say the song is not finished, and the record either benefits from that or does not.

The Cost of Genre Loyalty Tests

Heavy music polices its own boundaries more actively than almost any other genre, and bands that add melody are the most frequent target.

The accusation is always some version of selling out, and it rests on an assumption that heaviness and accessibility are opposed — that a chorus a general audience could enjoy must have been added for that audience rather than because it was good.

The history does not support it. The records that defined the genre in every era had hooks, and the bands remembered as uncompromising were frequently the most melodically sophisticated of their moment.

What the criticism does reliably produce is caution. Bands that fear the accusation write conservatively, which is a worse outcome for the genre than any individual pop chorus could be.

What Is Actually Being Tested

Two things. Whether an artist who has controlled every element of five records can share that control without the result losing its identity.

And whether an audience built on a specific emotional register follows a record that changes the register while keeping the subject.

Six albums, eleven songs, a new label, a second producer, and a closing track that says it made it.

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