Mastodon fans have been offered their first taste of the band's upcoming LP in the form of a 360-degree video set to a brief chunk of new music.

The teaser, which you can experience at the group's official site, sets the viewer in the middle of what likely seems to be the new record's album cover — a fiery landscape dominated by a towering figure with intimidating armor and a mangled skull for a face — and allows visitors to navigate via mouse movements.

Underneath it all is a 45-second loop of instrumental music offering emphatic assurance that the band's seventh LP will be just as muscular and aggressive as its predecessors. Details are deliberately vague at this point, but judging from the site's URL — eos360.mastodonrocks.com — it seems reasonable to guess that the title of the record is Eos, possibly a reference to the Greek goddess of the dawn.

Neither the site nor its soundtrack reflect the sort of peace or hope suggested by "goddess of the dawn," but that's par for the course with Mastodon — and as drummer Brann Dailor told Loudwire late last year, that makes sense given the concept running through the album.

"There’s been some illness within the band's family, there’s been a bunch of cancer, so the whole album is sort of all about cancer, basically. Well, not literally," said Dailor. "It’s a big story that sort roped to go along with it. It takes place in the desert."

The teaser's arrival fulfills hopes expressed by guitarist Bill Kelliher last year, when he pegged the new record for an "early 2017 release." Without referencing the concept tying the songs together, he promised fans, "What I can tell you is it definitely sounds like Mastodon, and there are peaks and valleys of one extreme to the other."

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