Beartooth released Disease on September 28, 2018, through Red Bull Records. For the band’s third studio album, Caleb Shomo moved recording from his basement to Nashville’s Blackbird Studio. He still recorded the vocals, guitars, bass and drums, but working with executive producer Nick Raskulinecz opened a process he had largely handled alone to another perspective.
The idea for the title track took shape during a difficult European tour in December 2016. Shomo told Revolver that his depression had intensified while the band was on the road. He wrote down the word “Disease,” then wrote the song in January or February 2017 after the tour ended. It was the first song he wrote for the album. He also wanted to move beyond the sense of recovery he had tried to convey on Aggressive. Looking back, Shomo felt he had presented himself as happier and further along than he actually was. “I felt like I was lying when I performed those songs,” he told the magazine. The new record would address what he was experiencing without pretending he had already found a solution.
Leaving his basement changed how Shomo approached the recordings, too. He told Alternative Press that he wanted “a new perspective,” while retaining his responsibilities as producer and mixer. Raskulinecz worked with him particularly at the beginning and end of the process, expanding his ideas about tones and sounds. Shomo also moved away from programming instruments, a decision that made recording more demanding. He explained the practical consequences to Kerrang!: an imperfect snare hit that he might previously have corrected with a sample meant playing the part again. He repeated drum takes even when he doubted the performance could improve, struggling to satisfy his own standards. By his account, making Disease had become the most physically and emotionally difficult recording experience of his career to that point.
Writing “You Never Know” with Drew Fulk, also known as WZRD BLD, went much faster. It was their first song together, and Shomo recalled writing it in about 40 minutes. Beforehand, the two had gone for coffee and talked about their lives and mental states. Finding common ground in that conversation helped the song develop quickly, he explained to Kerrang!.
That desire to communicate plainly also shaped the album’s closing track, “Clever.” In the Alternative Press interview, Shomo explained that listeners had sometimes misunderstood his metaphors or taken them too literally. For this song, he decided to describe exactly what was happening. Writing with so little distance between himself and the subject made it particularly difficult. The album ended with a deliberate attempt to make his experiences harder to misinterpret, following the same commitment to honesty that had guided the title track.
Beartooth returned to Blackbird to revisit the material from another direction. Released September 13, 2019, The Blackbird Session EP featured acoustic arrangements of four Disease songs, with country and folk influences replacing the original recordings’ heavier approach. Studio owner John McBride encouraged the project and served as guest engineer. “Disease,” “You Never Know” and “Clever” were among the songs the band recorded again, giving those accounts of Shomo’s experiences a different musical setting.
