...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 their first album to feature bassist Jason Newsted, following the death of Cliff Burton in 1986. Newsted had previously appeared on Metallica's 1987 EP The $5.98 E.P.: Garage Days Re-Revisited. ...And Justice for All features progressive metal music, very fast tempos, and few verse-chorus structures. It is noted for its dry, sterile production, which producer Flemming Rasmussen attributed to his absence during the album's mixing process. The songs' dark lyrics have themes of political and legal injustice, the prism of war, censored speech, and nuclear brinkmanship.

The front cover depicts the statue of Lady Justice cracked, blindfolded, and bound by ropes with her breasts exposed and both of her scales filled with dollars. The words "…And Justice for All" are written in graffiti-like lettering to the right. The cover art was created by Stephen Gorman, based on a concept developed by James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich. The album was initially released on one vinyl disc, but soon after re-released (without additional tracks) as a double-album.

...And Justice for All was acclaimed by music critics. The album was ranked at number nine in IGN's Top 25 Metal Albums, while the single "One" won the group's first ever Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance in 1990. The album was certified 8× platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) on June 9, 2003, having shipped eight million copies in the United States.

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by Steve Huey

The most immediately noticeable aspect of ...And Justice for All isn't Metallica's still-growing compositional sophistication or the apocalyptic lyrical portrait of a society in decay. It's the weird, bone-dry production. The guitars buzz thinly, the drums click more than pound, and Jason Newsted's bass is nearly inaudible. It's a shame that the cold, flat sound obscures some of the sonic details, because ...And Justice for All is Metallica's most complex, ambitious work; every song is an expanded suite, with only two of the nine tracks clocking in at under six minutes. It takes a while to sink in, but given time, ...And Justice for All reveals some of Metallica's best material. It also reveals the band's determination to pull out all the compositional stops, throwing in extra sections, odd-numbered time signatures, and dense webs of guitar arpeggios and harmonized leads. At times, it seems like they're doing it simply because they can; parts of the album lack direction and probably should have been trimmed for momentum's sake. Pacing-wise, the album again loosely follows the blueprint of Ride the Lightning, though not as closely as Master of Puppets. This time around, the fourth song -- once again a ballad with a thrashy chorus and outro -- gave the band one of the unlikeliest Top 40 singles in history; "One" was an instant metal classic, based on Dalton Trumbo's antiwar novel Johnny Got His Gun and climaxing with a pulverizing machine-gun imitation. As a whole, opinions on ...And Justice for All remain somewhat divided: some think it's a slightly flawed masterpiece and the pinnacle of Metallica's progressive years; others see it as bloated and overambitious. Either interpretation can be readily supported, but the band had clearly taken this direction as far as it could. The difficulty of reproducing these songs in concert eventually convinced Metallica that it was time for an overhaul.