I thought anybody who ‘yeah-eah’s had run out of ideas, but obviously I was wrong.

‘Toe to Toes’ is like an elegy for the plucky but unlucky protagonist (or protagonists depending on who you talk to or what day of the week it is) of Mastodon’s nigh-on twenty-year-long, colourful discographical narrative. Over almost two decades of hi-lo-hi with a Grammy nom and a head injury, Mastodon have done pretty much everything to their Eddies.

British cheesemakers Iron Maiden popularised the use of mascots in metal and popular music as a whole with the ‘zombie-like’ Eddie the Head

From a rambunctious reimagineering of Herman Melville’s Wet Hot American Summer, over rolling waves, into a great white mouth and along the long intestine of the leviathan on the Georgian metalheads’ second album of the same name, to cosmonautical freefall through the spacetime continuum into the body of Rasputin on progmetal paralydrama Crack the Skye, a cosmic concept album for drummer Brann Dailor’s late sister, Troy and co. have transmogrified their perennial protagonist every which way but loose: dead prey after dead prey for Mesozoic lizards in the sky and the octopi of Middle Life; a dummy, ventriloquised by gold and blow, on a paradimensional stage in a rock show for the Old Ones on polarising, Lovecraftian glamrockathon Once More ‘Round the Sun; and finally, a roaming cadaver, wandering through the empty desert beyond the hairline of time on the band’s seventh and most recent release, Emperor of Sand.

‘Toe to Toes’ is the teaser for an upcoming four-track compilation of outtakes entitled Cold Dark Place. While the other three songs on the release are leftovers from the 2013/14 sessions for OM’RtS, the lead single is the lone offcut from the making of EoS, and in my opinion, it is easily the best thing to come out of all of Mastodon’s time in the studio between 2016 and 2017, most of which was utterly fucking squandered on turning Mastodon songs into Stone Sour songs- like muzzling a good dog and teaching it to shit on the carpet when it used to open doors.

To me, ‘Toe to Toes’ seems to be the first time we’ve actually heard from Mastodon’s sonic mascot about being Mastodon’s sonic mascot; he (and he’s a he for the sake of simplicity and probability) knows the Hairy Bikers who sing him into life, and he knows that his seven-hour lifespan is a loop of the same 77 stories, bellowed, blastbeat and tremeloed into life by people with problems for people with problems, because the basic trial of Neanderthalean survival is the perfect cipher for the convoluted mush of modern life.

The single is remarkably fresh and flush with new, braver and better ideas. Opening with a commendably underproduced, two-bar star-spangled jangle, the song crashes headfirst into a frothing seastorm of viscous riffage, presided over by layers and layers of the Hair in Chief, Mr Sanders, roaring in place of the mouthless main character of the band’s discography and finally acknowledging his metaphorical metafictional prison. Other than the premature chorus, lyrically, the song is standard progmetal fare- claws and messages written in the sand in ‘your own blood’- but the cliches are educatedly elevated by stonking instrumentation. I could see Brann, Brent or Mastodon as a whole soundtracking something better than Jonah Hex in the future.

Thank god for the five-second rule, because it would have been a crime to leave this on the cutting-room floor. I can’t wait for Cold Dark Place to drop.