…And Justice for All by Metallica

...And Justice for All, Metallica's fourth studio album, came out on Elektra in 1988, and it's a monster: long, knotty, furious and cold as steel. It was their first full-length studio album with Jason Newsted on bass, after Cliff Burton's death in 1986, and Burton still gets a posthumous co-writing credit on "To Live Is to Die".

James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich spent four months of early 1988 making it with producer Flemming Rasmussen, with Kirk Hammett on guitar, and the songs pile riff on riff at breakneck speed, with hardly a verse or chorus in sight. The lyrics take aim at political and legal injustice, corruption, censorship and war, and the sleeve shows Lady Justice tied up in ropes, her scales spilling cash. The title comes from the closing words of the Pledge of Allegiance. "One", which creeps in hushed and slow and ends in a barrage, was Metallica's first music video and won them their first Grammy in 1990, the first ever handed out for Best Metal Performance.

The mix is famously dry and the bass all but vanishes, and people still grumble about it. At the 1989 Grammys the album itself had lost out to Jethro Tull, a result that caused a stir. But it went to number six on the Billboard 200 and eight-times platinum in 2003, and it's now counted among the band's best.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.