...And Justice for All

The band meant to record earlier, but festival dates in 1987 and a skateboarding injury to Hetfield's arm delayed it. Newsted had already played on the 1987 The $5.98 E.P. Mike Clink, who had produced Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction, was hired first because Rasmussen was unavailable in late January 1988, but the sessions went badly. They were not wasted: the band warmed up, recorded the B-side covers Breadfan (Budgie) and The Prince (Diamond Head), and kept drum tracks for The Shortest Straw and Harvester of Sorrow. Rasmussen took over about six weeks in. Each song began with a click track and Hetfield's guide guitar, then Ulrich's drums, Hetfield's rhythm parts, Newsted's bass, and finally vocals and Hammett's leads. Newsted recorded alone with only the assistant engineer present.

Rasmussen told Tape Op that it was tracked on an older Neve-style desk rather than the Trident used on the previous record. Bob Ludwig mastered it, and Steve Thompson and Michael Barbiero mixed it, with Rasmussen absent, and the sleeve notes say the mixing was done at Bearsville Studios in New York in June 1988. Rasmussen said they used only the close drum microphones and none of the room microphones, which produced the thin, clicking drum sound. He said Hetfield and Ulrich told him to take the bass down until it could barely be heard and then to lower it a further 3 dB. Hetfield said in 2009 that the bass often doubled his rhythm guitar. In 2019 he and Ulrich said their hearing was shot from touring and they kept turning everything else up until the bass disappeared. Newsted was unhappy with the result, and fans later made bass-boosted remixes, among them one called And Justice for Jason.

Songs

The title comes from the last words of the Pledge of Allegiance, and the lyrics deal with political and legal injustice, war and censorship. Ulrich called the writing the band's CNN years, since he and Hetfield watched the channel for subjects. Dyers Eve is a rant from Hetfield to his parents. To Live Is to Die carries Burton's credit because its bass line is a medley of unused recordings he made before his death. Its spoken section opens with a line from the film Excalibur and a line from Stephen R. Donaldson's novel Lord Foul's Bane, and the closing words are Burton's.

Stephen Gorman made the cover, a cracked statue of a blindfolded Lady Justice with her scales full of dollar bills, from a concept by Hetfield and Ulrich. He modeled it on the Fountain of Justice in Frankfurt.

Reception

It reached number 6 on the Billboard 200, spent 83 weeks on the chart, reached number 4 in the United Kingdom and number 1 in Finland, and is 8x Platinum in the United States. Singles were Harvester of Sorrow, Eye of the Beholder and One. Michael Azerrad of Rolling Stone called it a marvel of precisely channeled aggression. Other critics faulted the dry production and the missing bass, and Greg Kot called it the flattest-sounding record. Pitchfork's Sean T. Collins argued it is their best.

It was nominated at the 31st Grammys in February 1989 and lost to Jethro Tull's Crest of a Knave. The band answered by adding a 'Grammy Award LOSERS' sticker to the album. The category was split the next year, and One won Best Metal Performance. A deluxe box set followed in 2018.

Harvester of Sorrow was released in Europe only on 28 August 1988, and Eye of the Beholder in the United States only on 30 October. The band toured the album as the Damaged Justice tour. In his 2018 Pitchfork review of the 30th anniversary reissue, Sean T. Collins called it the biggest metal band's best album and the most abrasive-sounding record to sell over eight million copies.