BEARTOOTH will release its fourth studio album, "Below", on June 25 via Red Bull Records. The official Wyatt Clough-directed music video for the LP's latest single, "The Past Is Dead", can be seen below.
BEARTOOTH frontman Caleb Shomo commented: "'Below' is by far my favorite album I've made to date. It covers the dark side of dealing with mental strain during the last year. I gave it all I had — musically and lyrically. Is it too dark? Possibly, but it was as honest as I could be about how I felt. I hope everyone is ready to strap in for a wild ride of headbanging and rocking."
Regarding "The Past Is Dead", Caleb said: "'The Past Is Dead' was one of the first songs written for the album. The video is meant to depict the beginning of the journey to the deepest and darkest parts of my mind, which was the fuel used to make 'Below'."
"The Past Is Dead" follows the release of "Devastation", which will also appear on "Below".
"Below" track listing:
01. Below
02. Devastation
03. The Past Is Dead
04. Fed Up
05. Dominate
06. No Return
07. Phantom Pain
08. Skin
09. Hell Of It
10. I Wont Give It Up
11. The Answer
12. The Last Riff
Last July, Shomo told "Mosh Talks With Beez" about the writing and recording sessions for "Below": "I worked on a lot of this album on the road — a whole lot of this record. We honestly could not have been luckier with the way our record cycle laid out.
"The 'Disease' tour in Europe was our last tour of the cycle, and that finished on March 6th, I believe. And then the next week, everything got shut down. So we already planned to kind of take most of this year off. We planned on not taking it all off, like we're probably gonna have to.
"I'd already worked on a ton of the record, just writing out on the road; I brought a studio rig out there. And that was great.
"When it first started, the whole lockdown thing, I just kind of emotionally shut down for a month," he continued. "But then I just kind of caught a second wind, and I've just been ripping through songs. It's pretty cool."
Asked if the BEARTOOTH songwriting "formula" is still present in the band's new material, Caleb said: "I think that something about the BEARTOOTH sound is sort of that formula. BEARTOOTH has a song structure — it's the classic pop structure of intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, out. But with this one, I've just been trying to amp up everything. 'Cause with the last record, I really wanted to go for that super-raw, live-rock-and-roll-in-the-old-school-studio and old-school-console sound, and it was rad, and I loved doing it. And it was proving to myself that I can make a real record without computers — well, [without] heavily relying on computers. But I don't know… I just kind of realized, like, you know what? That's what I learned as a producer. I came up in the era of mixing in the box and recording in the box, which means using plug-ins and emulations and things like that. I've just been kind of using that to try and push it a little further. The formula is still there, but I don't think it's in a bad way. I think it's the formula people want from a BEARTOOTH record.
"This one is just jacked," he explained. "Everything is amped up to 11. I am so, so pumped. Obviously, this is what you wanna think when you're making a record, but damn, this is the best one yet. Not even close. This is the heaviest record. This is my best work — the most proud I've been of these songs. It's wild. It's some heavy-duty shit."
Speaking about the musical direction of the new BEARTOOTH songs, Shomo said: "The easiest way I've been trying to explain this record to people without giving too much away is if 'Disease' was AC/DC, this record is BLACK SABBATH. It's a lot more influenced in dark stoner rock, heavy power groove. Obviously, there's still a lot of fast [stuff] and some punk rock and all that, but I've really been exploring with the stoner metal side of guitars and guitar tones and doing different tunings and lots of fuzz and chaos and layering the fuck out of my guitar tracks.
"The whole point, for me, of this mix and the sonics of this record is as big and loud and fucking sonically devastating as I can possibly get it," he said. "So on a breakdown, for example, where on 'Disease' it would just be left guitar, right guitar, bass down the middle, this is literally… That little clip I posted [on Instagram ] is I think eight guitars, three bass tracks. Just experimenting — just doing dumb stoner shit and just trying my fucking best. Yeah, that's the goal — is just sonic devastation, for sure."
BEARTOOTH's latest release was the folk- and country music-inspired "The Blackbird Session" EP, which came out in September 2019.
The band's third album, "Disease", was released in September 2018 via Red Bull Records. The disc was recorded at BlackBird studio in Franklin, Tennessee with producer Nick Raskulinecz (DEFTONES, KORN, FOO FIGHTERS).
