Caleb Shomo (Beartooth) shares his feelings about the response of his coming out

Beartooth frontman Caleb Shomo talked about the band’s new album, “Pure Ecstasy,” feeling more at ease in his own skin, and finding the inner strength to come out as a “proudly gay man” in May 2026 after “a decade burying feelings with alcohol” in a recent interview with The Break Down With Nath & Johnny, as per Blabbermouth. Three months before “Pure Ecstasy” was released, on May 23, Caleb came out as gay in an Instagram post. When asked if he expected the conflicting response from Beartooth fans, he responded as follows.

The whole process was very just completely in the moment with very little thought about the future, to be completely honest. There was his whole period for about a year of just very, very creative exploration, musically, that I was going through on my own a little bit more. And the biggest, I guess, issue I kept running into is I kept wanting to just write very broad and nonspecific lyrics trying to capture an emotion of some kind, and trying to manifest things in my life. I’m realizing now that I was really just… That’s what I was doing — I was trying to manifest things, and I was trying to manifest strength in my life and empowerment.

So, I had this whole phase where I was just writing these songs that were just these lyrics that are just, like, kind of blindly empowering, which was cool and it was fun, and it made for some really interesting stuff. But the truth was I was just afraid. And I knew what I should write the record about. And when [‘Pure Ecstasy’ co-producer] Jordan [Fish] came into the picture, that’s when it all changed.

“When [Jordan and I first] worked together, I’d already been out to some friends and family for a few months at that point, and we got together, and he happened to be in town and happened to be free, and we’d wanted to work together for forever, and we hadn’t yet. And he was, like, ‘Do you have an afternoon?’ I was, like, ‘Absolutely. Let’s fucking work.’ So he comes over, and just like any situation with a co-write or working with anybody else that I ever get myself into, if it’s for Beartooth, we just sit and drink coffee and fucking talk, and just talk about what I’m going through, talk about what I’m listening to.

We talk about them. We talk about all this shit. And obviously, that comes up, as that had been kind of, like, the main thing going on in my life and the main thing I was dealing with. And he really encouraged me to write about it, and directly write about it. Because in that moment, if we were writing anything else, it wouldn’t have been worth our time. And, yeah, then we wrote ‘Free’, and that song changed everything.

I showed [Jordan] my entire body of work. I sent it to him, and he got to live with it for a while. And after that session, he called me, I think, a couple of weeks later, and we had a really, really honest conversation about all the music that I had been working on, and he just gave me some really good insight where he’s, like, ‘Dude, this is super cool and really, really creative and really out there. But looking from the outside at what Beartooth is, and after working with you and knowing what Beartooth is, this is not a Beartooth record.

What a Beartooth record is to me, to what I assume most people who listen to it or know anything about it, and to you, if I go through the history of the band, is it’s you taking a really hard and honest inward look about the things you’re struggling with and talking about them very candidly and very openly, and you’re just not doing that with any of this stuff.’ And he was, like, ‘I can tell you from experience, as much as doing these really creative, out-there things is important for you as a musician and as an artist, you’re going to regret this in the long run if you stamp a Beartooth title on this and call this a Beartooth record.’ And I agreed. And we talked about how scared I was, and we know the truth, we know what this record needs to be about, and that’s, I believe, when I asked him to be a producer on the record, like full-blown 50/50, man. Like, ‘I need you to co-produce this with me for real.’

And he said yes, and he came back over to the States for about five or six days, and we just went on a fucking crazy run. We wrote ‘Beautiful Again’, we wrote ‘Eyes Closed’. Within 48 hours, those were done. ‘Lose You To Find Me’ was another one we wrote, just like that. And then, yeah, after that, we spent about three weeks on Zoom and FaceTime while he was in England, ’cause he was working on other shit, and he’s got a family and a life. And I’d just wake up at, like, 5:00, 6:00 in the morning, and we’d work all day, and rewrite the old stuff, and work on the lyric and the melody and everything to bring it into what’s really happening

Caleb made this statement about his choice to come out in public three months ago.

Honestly, I was just dealing with so much in my life and my personal life and the weight of that album that I just kind of turned the fucking blinders on and just ran, and just ran full speed. And then it was done, and I just fucking turned it in after I mixed it and was, like, ‘This is it. I’m not changing anything. I’m not giving myself a chance to get scared of this thing. This is just what it was. This was the moment. It’s meant to be. I just have to let go.’ And then all this shit happened, and my life exploded, and it became very public. And I just felt like I wanted to address what was going on before it got addressed for me. And that was that. And here I am today.

Caleb responded as follows when asked how his bandmates felt about his taking that shift and whether they had discussed the potential consequences of him discussing something so intimate in public.

Um, not necessarily. At the time it was just about… ‘Cause obviously they knew — they knew what was going on with me, and they’re some of the first people I told. And I think more than anything, all that we were focused on as a band was just the record and the music. And Oshie [Bichar, bass], for a few records now, has kind of taken on this executive producer role almost, kind of like in a Rick Rubin sense, where he, from a distance, will just be absorbing everything, and then when he feels like he really has something that needs to be said, he’ll come to me with it and make suggestions, maybe it being track listing or parts or moments or whatever. All we were focused on was the music.

And they knew what it was about. They’ve been in this band long enough to know me and know how I make these records and why I make these records and what it does for me and my life. And I think the reality is none of us were thinking about fallout at all. None of us were thinking about anything but the music. And do we love the music? Do we love this record? And are we gonna be excited to play this thing for the next year, year and a half, however long this record cycle is? And we were, and we were stoked, and had a great time making it, and felt really proud of it. And then ‘Free’ happens, and it was just a real eye-opener.

The first time I told people was in September of ’25, and that song came out in, like, February, late February. And I had already decided, like, I’m not gonna water myself down at all. I’m going to just do what I wanna do. I’m gonna wear what I wanna wear. I’m gonna sing how I wanna sing. I’m gonna look how I wanna look and just enjoy being an artist that’s allowed to do that, and that has the freedom to do that. And that was met with a lot of opposition and a lot of… I mean, really, just a lot of homophobia, and a lot of people who really were not okay with me presenting that way at all with what I was doing, any of it.

And it was just kind of sad, I guess, is probably the only way to put it. And at that point in my life, aside from the band as well, I was going through so much that I just decided I just wanted to like get off the Internet for a while, which I did. Because I was, like, ‘You know what? I have a lot of things I have to tend to. I am on this tour.’ I mean, we were on the biggest tour we had ever done. We were direct support to Bad Omens in sold-out basketball arenas with President opening. Like, this is a big fucking deal and a big tour, and we’re playing with incredible bands, and I gotta be on top form. And it was tough. It was a tough tour. I mean, a lot of the day I’d be spent in a really, really bad place and just trying to find enough energy and enough will to get myself warmed up and get on that stage and do my fucking job.

And it didn’t really change as we kept releasing more songs, and the very vocal opposition continued and still continues to. And, yeah, me coming out didn’t help that. [Laughs] And just being honest with people about who I am and what’s been going on and what this record’s about on a deeper level. And, yeah, the truth is I have no idea how it’s gonna go. I’m trying, as of right now, to just keep my focus very narrow. I’m trying to keep my focus on training for tour, on knowing that whether people show up or not to these shows, I’m going to give them the best show that I possibly can, and I’m working on a new record. And I have a lot that I need to say and a lot that I need to process and work through, and that’s the only way I can do it. So I’m just trying to think baby steps.