It is no accident that drummer Brann Dailor emerges as the standout musician on Mastodon’s 2002 debut, Remission. His relentlessly busy playing would quickly become a cornerstone of the band’s sonic uniqueness. But Dailor’s impact on Remission runs even deeper, as each flurry of percussion was the product of a man working through an unspeakably traumatic event: His sister had been lost to suicide when she was just 14. The long and crushing shadow of this pivotal moment in Dailor’s adolescence had eventually, by his own admission, lured him into playing with Nashville’s noise-metal group TODAY IS THE DAY—a job he took while in pursuit of violent musical release. That band was immersed in trauma, and as a result, their albums were confrontational—even by the genre’s most extreme standards. 1999’s In the Eyes of God was the last TODAY IS THE DAY effort to feature both Dailor and guitarist Bill Kelliher before the pair moved to Atlanta to start Mastodon—a group that would explore a less overt, but no less cathartic, world of hurt with Remission. Bassist Troy Sanders has described the album, elementally, as the band’s “fire” record. There’s a complex existential rage at work throughout; the idea that burning alive might be as natural to languishing as it is to letting go. And if that’s the case, why not simply shrivel, as fires always do? Remission’s signature track, “March of the Fire Ants,” is not about insects going about their day in a literal sense, but a metaphorical one: “As passion encircles the daily storm/The heart bleeds and droughts do not,” bellows guitarist Brent Hinds, curtailing into the conceit that we, as people, can do all that is necessary to better ourselves—but at the end of all our efforts, death still awaits. All seven minutes of the lynchpin album epic “Trainwreck” laser in on the comfortably numb, cyclical “train track” of carrying on—and, by necessity, collecting more baggage along the way. Therein lies a realization: Perhaps a figurative train wreck is necessary if we, as Dailor has understood in retrospect, wish to meaningfully transform our lives via emotional remission.