Metalcore band Beartooth is continuing the ramp-up to its new album, Aggressive, by rolling out yet another song from the project. Having already premiered the tracks “Hated” and “Loser” from the Red Bull Records album, Beartooth is now exclusively premiering “Fair Weather Friend” on Billboard today.
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“It’s a bit more rock and melody-driven than a lot of the other songs,” says singer Caleb Shomo in comparing “Fair Weather Friend” with the rest of the tracks on Aggressive. “There’s definitely more guitar stuff going on, there’s more leads and weird pedals we used at [producer David] Bendeth’s studio.” Listen to the track below:
Bendeth — whose credits include everyone from Paramore and Bring Me the Horizon to Elvis Presley and Jeff Beck — co-wrote “Fair Weather Friend” with Shomo. “About midway through the recording process, I got pretty burnt out. Being in Ohio in a basement in the winter for long hours kinda had me cracked,” recalls Shomo. “So I then went to New Jersey the following morning kind of on a whim. Big fan of David Bendeth. Love his mixes, and we just clicked and we wrote ‘Fair Weather Friend,’ and it rocked.”
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The subject matter of “Fair Weather Friend” is self-explanatory. “The song is more generally about fair-weather friends as a whole. Everybody’s got ’em, and everyone’s got a million stories,” says Shomo. “But it definitely felt like it was a song that people could connect to.”
Beartooth is definitely connecting to people in the right ways. Slipknot/Stone Sour frontman Corey Taylor gave the band props after he premiered the Aggressive track “Loser” on his Beats 1 radio show, A Series of Bleeps, in May, saying, “Beartooth give me hope for the future.”
Shomo says of the compliment, “Really f—ing cool, ’cause he’s in an amazing band. Really good performer. He’s a really cool guy. He was really nice to meet and hang out with on the Slipknot tour.”
Aggressive arrives June 3. Beartooth is celebrating with album-release shows at Los Angeles’ The Roxy Theatre on street date and at New York’s The Studio at Webster Hall on June 6 before heading to Europe to tour into July, hitting such festivals as Download France, Graspop Metal Meeting and Copenhell. For more information about tour dates, visit Beartoothband.com/tour.