The Case for ...And Justice For All (2026)

…And Justice For All is Metallica’s best album

Let’s start with some context.

For those who don’t know, Cliff Burton was Metallica's bassist from late 1982 until his untimely death in 1986.

Cliff was often described as the best musician in Metallica, with the best understanding of harmony and melody.

This can be heard clearly in two of his instrumental compositions for the band, Anesthesia (Pulling Teeth) Off of Kill em All (1983), and Orion, from Master of Puppets (1986). 

I recommend listening to those specifically if you want to hear who Cliff was as a composer, bassist, and musician in general.

In 1986, while on tour in Sweden, Metallica's bus skidded off the road and overturned. Cliff was thrown through a window and crushed by the bus.

He was 24.

It is one of the greatest tragedies in modern music.

I don’t need to explain how this affected the members of the band, you can infer that.

I believe understanding this event is essential knowledge for analyzing …And Justice For All.

The largest criticism levied against And Justice For All is the mix, specifically the bass being inaudible. 

Jason Newstead was brought on in the impossible position of being Cliff’s replacement.

The story often goes that he was treated as sort of “second-class band member” typically with Lars as the primary aggressor, who made the call to turn down the bass. 

Everybody seems to have a different interpretation of this but as far as I can gather this seems to be the most corroborated story. 

Regardless of the internal politics of the band, what is undeniable is that the bass is essentially inaudible in the final mix.

I see this as the band musically unable to cope with Cliff’s loss.

The result is this brittle, dry, sharp sound dominated by the guitars and the drums, with a pervasive emptiness throughout.

And, While a detractor for many, I’d argue that this sound serves the album's themes.

…And Justice For All thematically, in a word, is nihilistic.

We’ll get into the lyrics in a moment, but this nihilism exists in the very sound of the record. 

The pervasive emptiness mentioned before, with specifically the total lack of bass, to me is, even if completely unintentional, an homage to Cliff.

It forces the listener to understand how irreplaceable Cliff was.

The music lets the lack of bass on the record reflect the emptiness of the band without him, at least emotionally speaking.

Now as to the lyrics,

The first half of the chorus in the title track goes as follows: “Justice is lost, Justice is raped, Justice is gone, Pulling your strings, Justice is done.”

The song is really about how those with money and power are able to skirt justice despite their evil, and furthermore, are the very ones who decide what justice looks like for the everyone else.

I can’t help but feel though, as I listen to it, that the cry out for justice is more universal.

That idea of justice in a universal sense is never served.

How could you believe in Justice after the tragedy the band had just suffered.

I see more of this “lack of universal justice” and trauma explored in the opener, Blackened.

Blackened is essentially about a doomsday scenario turning “mother earth” into a completely dead apocalyptic wasteland, probably inspired by nuclear anxiety amid the cold war (remember this album came out in the 80s)

Metallica has dealt with topics like death and darkness and destruction in their previous albums, like any good metal band should, but never has the scale been so large.

“Smoldering decayTake her breath awayMillions of our yearsIn minutes disappears”

Also the sheer brutality in the bridge:

“See our mother

Put to death

See our mother die”

My delivery does do not justice for James Hetfields vocal performance in this section, no pun intended.

It reflects a new level of darkness for the band.

Far and away the most popular song on this album is “One” which is inspired directly from the book “Johnny Got his Gun” written in 1938, with a film adaptation in 1971.

The book is about a World War 1 vet who has lost all of his limbs and all of his senses: vision, smell, hearing, touching, and tasting, whatever, but his mind still functions perfectly, awake to the horrors of his existence and the utter helplessness to stop it.

The name “johnny got his gun” comes from a phrase/piece of propaganda in the World War 1 era going “johnny get your gun.” 

It was used in media at the time to encourage young men to enlist by making war look cool.

The dark sarcasm in the title of this book precisely what metallica did in titling …And Justice For All.

It takes American propaganda, in this case the ending of the pledge of allegiance, which all Americans had to do every single day in school growing up, and exposing its bullshit through sarcasm.

It basically says “...And Justice For All, Yeah Right!” And if Dave Mustaine were still in the band that’s probably what it would’ve been called.

So the album's lyrics are a brutal nihilistic meditation on many different forms of suffering and the lack of Justice in the wake of them.

The mix reflects the harsh empty pain associated with these thoughts.

The final piece of the puzzle here is song structure.

Now, as the long, winding, progressive song structures relate to themes of darkness and desolation, I got nothing.

I don’t think they are relevant to the albums lyrical themes, but in a musical sense, they are Metallica’s greatest compositional achievements to date.

Many cite Master of Puppets as the band's greatest album because it was all the things that made the band great before with (at the time) the best production, the best vocals, the heaviest riffs, and what I believe is the crux of the biscuit here, the song structures.

Metallica are the masters of taking fast paced thrash metal music, and essentially structuring it into a progressive rock song. 

Recurring themes, long runtimes, innate musicianship, all the while keeping the momentum up right till the very end. 

This part of their style reached a peak on …And Justice For All, and i’m not just saying that because it has their longest songs on it.

I’m saying It because it has their best set of tunes with the strongest momentum for the longest time.

The title track, at ten minutes in length, feels no longer than a 4 minute long thrash banger. 

The composition is utterly brilliant. 

Every section is fully explored without overstaying its welcome, and i’d argue that this not a quality for some songs on Master of Puppets.

Namely The Thing that Should Not Be, Leper Messiah, and (I know I gave this one a shoutout earlier) Orion, all have sections that drag on and have substantial fat that could have been cut out. 

The only song that truly feels like it’s length on And Justice For All is To Live Is To Die, another extremely nihilistic title. 

The track is a ten minute instrumental piece which cycles between these somber pretty acoustic sections and heavy riffage. 

The song is very slow for Metallica standards and certainly drags but, notably, this is the only song on the album with a posthumous writing credit from Cliff.

It feels as if Metallica wanted to make Cliff’s final work for the band a centerpiece for the album.

They honor his greatness with a long goodbye, a beautiful send off for an integral part of their music and their lives. 

And then it sharply transitions into Dyer’s Eve which fucking rips and is another underrated tune in their catelogue. 

In “One” the way the band introduces the classic machine gun riff (you know the one) and then elaborates on it until the end of the track is utterly brilliant thematic development. 

It appears subtly in the kick drums under a flurry of harmonized guitar leads and riffing.

Then the guitars hold out this tense chord for 4 bars while the drum groove takes center stage, firmly establishing the rhythm. 

Then the guitars join in and play the rhythm on one note for four bars. 

Then they introduce a chord in between the gaps in the rhythm for one bar, then back to the riff as it was before, then back to that same chord they previously introduced, and then they had another chord in quick succession until that becomes the repeated riff, until the vocals come in where they back to the original riff but slightly modified using what they previously established. And then they modify the riff further into the thrash section, wherein I could make a whole different video unraveling that section.

One is probably the best song on the album, and a contender for Metallica’s greatest song period, but this level of writing is apparent on every other song on the album.

Eye of the Beholder, Harvester of Sorrow, Blackened, all of these songs have riffs that undergo brilliant motivic development, dare I say on the level of someone like Beethoven, and No I am not going to back that up with examples because I am not getting paid for this shit.

My final point in this album’s greatness is simply the level of musicianship the band achieves here and how satisfying it is to hear especially after listening to the bands previous albums.

I don’t have to say much here because I think this part truly speaks for itself but I’ll give a particular shout out to James’s vocals.

Hearing how his voice and chops matured throughout Metallica’s catalogue is awesome and this is certainly a high point on that front.

Anyways, let me know what you think.

RIP Cliff

Take care of yourself and don’t start smoking. Thanks.