Caleb Shomo was born on December 1, 1992. As Beartooth’s vocalist, songwriter and producer, he turned a basement recording project into a band built around deeply personal songs. On its early recordings, his contribution extended across vocals, guitar, bass, drums and production.
His habit of switching instruments started long before Beartooth. In an interview originally published by Revolver in June 2021, Shomo recalled taking piano lessons as a child, then learning guitar, bass and drums around the same time. By high school, he was playing with musicians from Attack Attack!, the band he joined on keyboards before becoming its vocalist. Recording became another part of the job, giving him ways to shape a song beyond the microphone.
On Attack Attack!’s 2012 album This Means War, Shomo took charge of recording, production, mixing and mastering. When he left the band, he considered producing other artists instead of continuing to tour. Writing “I Have a Problem” helped clarify the decision: he told Revolver that hearing the song back made him recognize he needed to leave a situation that no longer brought him joy. The early Beartooth material gave him somewhere to write without expecting anyone beyond close friends to hear it.
The first Beartooth EP, Sick, arrived in 2013, followed by the debut album Disgusting on June 10, 2014. Its closing track, “Sick and Disgusting,” carried that private intensity into a public release. Shomo recorded the vocal in one take, breaking down during the performance. Speaking to Metal Hammer in September 2014, he said he’d tried listening again but stopped partway through. “It’s not something you put on to show your friends,” he said. That left the debut with an ending that was difficult even for its creator to revisit.
His writing also made room for experiences outside his own life. “Beaten in Lips” grew from conversations with people at shows who had experienced child abuse. Shomo told Metal Hammer he hadn’t experienced that himself; the song was his response to what they shared with him. Those conversations gave him another reason to keep making music, because he felt the struggles he put into a record could help somebody else.
By The Surface, released on October 13, 2023, Shomo was deliberately making room for a different emotional register. He told Rock Sound that “Riptide” was the first song he wrote after quitting drinking and making substantial changes in his life. He chose it to introduce the album’s direction. He still wanted heavier passages for emotions that needed them, while allowing the songs to move further into the pop writing that had long informed his choruses.
That shift also changed what he allowed himself to do as a singer. On “Might Love Myself,” he included an elaborate vocal run, describing a session in which confidence let him get lost in the performance. “I really wanted to serve every song in the best way possible,” he told Rock Sound. He explained that he wrote the song as he began to understand self-love, capturing that realization in the recording.
