Metallica "...And Justice for All"

…And Justice for All is the fourth studio album by American heavy metal band Metallica, released on August 25, 1988, by Elektra Records. It was the band’s first studio album to feature bassist Jason Newsted after the death of Cliff Burton in 1986. …And Justice for All is musically progressive, with long and complex songs, fast tempos, and few verse-chorus structures. The album is noted for its sterile production, which producer Flemming Rasmussen attributed to his absence during the mixing process. The lyrics feature themes of political and legal injustice seen through the prisms of censorship, war, and nuclear brinkmanship.

The album’s front cover, designed by Stephen Gorman on a scheme by James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich, features a representation of Lady Justice, bound by ropes, with one breast bare and its scales tipping toward one plate filled with money. The phrase “…And Justice for All” appears spray-painted in the lower right corner. The album title is derived from the American Pledge of Allegiance. Three songs from the album were released as singles: “Harvester of Sorrow”, “Eye of the Beholder”, and “One”, while the title track was released as a promotional single.

…And Justice for All was acclaimed by music critics. It was included in The Village Voice’s annual Pazz & Jop critics’ poll of the year’s best albums, and the single “One” earned Metallica its first Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance in 1990. The group’s best-selling album at the time, it was the first underground metal album to achieve chart success in the United States. The album was certified 8× platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in 2003 for shipping eight million copies in the US, making it Metallica’s second-best-selling album in the country.

Metallica recorded the album with producer Flemming Rasmussen over four months in early 1988 at One on One Recording Studios in Los Angeles. It features aggressive complexity, fast tempos, and few verse-chorus structures, with a dry and a bass-light mix. The lyrical themes of political and legal injustice project through the prisms of censorship, war, and nuclear brinkmanship. The cover, designed by Stephen Gorman based on a concept by Metallica guitarist James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich, depicts Lady Justice bound in ropes. The album title is derived from the American Pledge of Allegiance. Three of its songs were released as singles: "Harvester of Sorrow", "Eye of the Beholder", and "One"; the title track was released as a promotional single.

And Justice for All is the first Metallica album to feature bassist Jason Newsted after the death of Cliff Burton in 1986; Newsted had previously played on the 1987 Metallica EPThe $5.98 E.P.: Garage Days Re-Revisited. Metallica had intended to record the album earlier, but was sidetracked by the large number of festival dates scheduled for the summer of 1987, including the European leg of the Monsters of Rock festival. Another reason was frontman James Hetfield's arm injury in a skateboarding accident.

Metallica's previous studio album, Master of Puppets (1986), was their last under their contract with the record label Music for Nations. Manager Peter Mensch wanted them to sign with British record distributor Phonogram Records. Phonogram manager Martin Hooker offered them "well over £1 million, which at that time was the biggest deal we'd ever offered anyone". His explanation was that the final figure for combined British and European sales of all three Metallica albums was more than 1.5 million copies.

And Justice for All was recorded from January to May 1988 at One on One Recording Studios in Los Angeles. Metallica produced the album with Flemming Rasmussen. He had been initially unavailable for the planned start on January 1, 1988, and the band hired Mike Clink, who had caught their attention for producing the debut Guns N' Roses album Appetite for Destruction (1987). Plans deteriorated, and Rasmussen became available three weeks after drummer Lars Ulrich had first called him. Rasmussen listened to Clink's rough mixes for the album on his February 14 flight to Los Angeles, and upon his arrival, Clink was fired. Hetfield explained that recording with Clink had been problematic, and Rasmussen was a last-minute replacement. Clink is credited with engineering drums on "The Shortest Straw" and "Harvester of Sorrow". Awaiting Rasmussen's arrival, the band had recorded two cover songs—"Breadfan" and "The Prince"—to "fine‑tune the sound while they got into the studio vibe". Both were released as B-sides for singles from the album and were later included on the 1998 cover album Garage, Inc.

Rasmussen's first task was to adjust and arrange the guitar sound, with which the band was dissatisfied. A guide track for the tempos and a click track for Ulrich's drumming were used. The band played in a live room, recording the instruments separately. Each song used three reels: one for drums, a second for bass and guitars, and a third for other parts. Hetfield wrote lyrics during the recording sessions; these were occasionally unfinished as recording began, and Rasmussen said that Hetfield "wasn't really interested in singing" but instead "wanted that hard vibe". Metallica's recording process was new to Jason Newsted, who questioned his impact on the overall sound and the lack of discussion with the rest of the team. He recorded his parts separately, with only the assistant engineer present. Newsted had had a different experience with his previous band, Flotsam and Jetsam, whose style he described as "basically everybody playing the same thing like a sonic wall".

At the instruction of Hetfield and Ulrich, the bass guitar was made almost inaudible. According to Rasmussen: "After Lars and James heard their initial mixes the first thing they said was, 'Take the bass down so you can just hear it, and then once you've done that take it down a further 3dBs.' I have no idea why they wanted that, but it was totally out of my hands, and I didn't even know about it until the album had been released." In 2009, Hetfield said that the bass was obscured as the basslines often doubled his rhythm guitar, making the instruments indiscernible, and because the low frequencies were competing in the mix with his "scooped", bassy guitar sound.

With the band mostly self-producing, there was no traditional producer present in the studio to guide their new bassist. Newsted was not satisfied with the final mixes: "The Justice album wasn't something that really felt good for me, because you really can't hear the bass." Steve Thompson, who mixed the album, blamed Ulrich for the inaudible bass. According to Thompson, when Ulrich presented his ideas on the production, Thompson was not allowed to quit, and received the majority of the criticism for the mix. Rasmussen said in 2018: "I’m probably one of the only people in the world, including Jason and Toby Wright, the assistant engineer, who heard the bass tracks on And Justice for All, and they are fucking brilliant."

In 2019, Hetfield and Ulrich said they had mixed the bass low not to belittle Newsted, but because their hearing was "shot" following heavy touring and they "basically kept turning everything else up until the bass disappeared". They decided not to adjust the bass mix for the remastered 2019 reissue, saying: "These records are a product of a certain time in life; they’re snapshots of history and they’re part of our story … And Justice for All could use a little more low end and St. Anger could use a little less tin snare drum, but those things are what make those records part of our history."

And Justice for All is a musically progressive album featuring long and complex songs, fast tempos and few verse-chorus structures. Metallica decided to broaden its sonic range, writing songs with multiple sections, heavy guitar arpeggios and unusual time signatures. Hetfield explained: "Songwriting-wise, [the album] was just us really showing off and trying to show what we could do. 'We've jammed six riffs into one song? Let's make it eight. Let's go crazy with it.'"

Critic Simon Reynolds noted the riff changes and experimentation with timing on the album's epically constructed songs: "The tempo shifts, gear changes, lapses, decelerations and abrupt halts". BBC Music's Eamonn Stack wrote that And Justice for All sounds different from the band's previous albums, with longer songs, sparser arrangements, and harsher vocals by Hetfield. According to journalist Martin Popoff, the album is less melodic than its predecessors because of its frequent tempo changes, unusual song structures and layered guitars. He argued that the album is more of a progressive metal record because of its intricately performed music and bleak sound. Music writer Joel McIver called the album's music aggressive enough for Metallica to maintain its place with bands "at the mellower end of extreme metal". According to writer Christopher Knowles, Metallica took "the thrash concept to its logical conclusion" on the album.

The album was noted for its "dry, sterile" production. Rasmussen said that was not his intention, as he tried for an ambient sound similar to the previous two albums. He was not present during the album's mixing, for which Steve Thompson and Michael Barbiero had been hired beforehand. Rasmussen assumed that, in his absence from the mixing process, Thompson and Barbiero used only the close microphones on the mix and none of the room microphones, thus causing the "clicking", thin drum sound. The bass guitar is nearly inaudible, while the guitars sound "strangled mechanistic". He saw the "synthetic" percussion as another reason for the album's compressed sound.

The album title was revealed in April 1988: And Justice for All, after the final words of the Pledge of Allegiance. The lyrics address political and legal injustice as seen through the prism of war, censored speech, and nuclear brinksmanship. The majority of the songs raise issues that differ from the violent retaliation of the previous releases. Tom King wrote that for the first time the lyrics dealt with political and environmental issues. He named contemporaries Nuclear Assault as the only other band who applied ecological lyrics to thrash metal songs rather than singing about Satan and Egyptian plagues. McIver noted that Hetfield, the band's main lyricist, wrote about topics that he had not addressed before, such as his revolt against the establishment. Ulrich described the songwriting process as their "CNN years", with him and Hetfield watching the channel in search for song subjects—"I'd read about the blacklisting thing, we'd get a title, 'The Shortest Straw,' and a song would come out of that."

Concerns about the environmental plight of the planet ("Blackened"), corruption ("And Justice for All"), and blacklisting and discrimination ("The Shortest Straw") are emphasized with traditional existential themes. Issues such as freedom of speech and civil liberties are presented from a grim and pessimistic point of view. "One" was unofficially nicknamed an "antiwar anthem" because of the lyrics which portray the suffering of a wounded soldier. "Dyers Eve" is a lyrical rant from Hetfield to his parents. Burton received co-writing credit on "To Live Is to Die" as the bass line is a medley of unused recordings Burton had performed prior to his death. Because the original recordings are not used on the track, the composition is credited as written by Burton and played by Newsted. The spoken word section of the song was erroneously attributed in its entirety to Burton in the liner notes. The first line was actually written by German poet Paul Gerhardt ("When a man lies, he murders some part of the world.") while the second line comes from Lord Foul's Bane, a fantasy novel by American writer Stephen R. Donaldson ("These are the pale deaths which men miscall their lives."). The second half of the speech ("All this I cannot bear to witness any longer. Cannot the kingdom of salvation take me home?") was written by Burton.

Track listing

All lyrics were written by James Hetfield, except for the spoken word section of "To Live Is to Die", posthumously attributed to Cliff Burton. The bonus tracks on the digital re-release were recorded live at the Seattle Coliseum, Seattle, Washington on August 29 and 30, 1989, and later appeared on the live album Live Shit: Binge & Purge (1993).

1. "Blackened" Jason Newsted/Lars Ulrich/James Hetfield 6:41
2. "...And Justice for All" Ulrich/Kirk Hammett/Hetfield 9:47
3. "Eye of the Beholder" Hetfield/Hammett/Ulrich 6:30
4. "One" Ulrich/Hetfield 7:27
5. "The Shortest Straw" Hetfield/Ulrich 6:36
6. "Harvester of Sorrow" Ulrich/Hetfield 5:46
7. "The Frayed Ends of Sanity" Hammett/Ulrich/Hetfield 7:44
8. "To Live Is to Die" (instrumental) Hetfield/Ulrich/Burton 9:49
9. "Dyers Eve" Ulrich/Hetfield/Hammett 5:13

Total length: 65:33

The album's central theme is "Injustice". 

Metallica's first promotional video was shot for "One". Three different versions/edits of that video exist, featuring cuts from the movie "Johnny Got His Gun", on which it is based. 

With regards to the album's mix, and according to Flemming Rasmussen, Lars and James asked to ‘Take the bass down so you can just hear it, and then once you’ve done that take it down a further 3dBs.’

Recording information:

Recorded from January to May, 1988 at One on One in Los Angeles, California.

Mixed in June, 1988 at Bearsville Studios in New York.

Mastered at Masterdisk in New York.