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after the tortuous slabs of prog-metal that precede it. The final track on the album, as climaxes go it’s good but not in the same game as ‘Damage, Inc.’, its success a mark of how heavy-handed the rest of the album sounds next to it. It was also, interestingly, the first Hetfield lyric – ‘Dear Mother / Dear Father / What is this hell you have put me through?’ – in which he directly addresses some of the issues of his repressed childhood: ‘It’s basically about this kid who’s been hidden from the real world by his parents the whole time he was growing up, and now that he’s in the real world he can’t cope with it and is contemplating suicide,’ Lars explained. ‘It’s basically a letter from the kid to his parents, asking them why they didn’t expose him to the real world…’ It would not be the last self-portrait from the pen of James Hetfield.

With its flat, wooden sound, its increasingly hollow-sounding anger, its less-palatable-because-it’s-more-real bitterness and, most of all, its horribly self-regarding posturing, instead of being the radically ‘different’ masterpiece Lars had envisaged, Justice was a sideways step at best, a miscalculation; at worst a disfiguringly weird statement they would all largely disown as time went by and better albums were made. Its only real saving grace was the extraordinary ‘One’ – and the fact that it united them in never again wanting to make an album so bleak in its outlook or dire in its musical palate. The days of Metallica the out-and-out heavy metal monster were now numbered.

The great irony was that the place where they seemingly aimed to be most innovatory was the area in which Justice sounds most unconvincing of all: the production. As Rasmussen says, ‘The sound was totally dry…thin and hard and loud.’ In fact, the whole album seems curiously void of reverb, the special sauce used to make the most mediocre sound sparkle in a mix. Rasmussen doesn’t disagree but maintains he delivered ‘almost ninety-nine per cent’ of the sound he was instructed to get: ‘Everybody was really pleased with it once we’d finished and then about a month or so after, people were starting not to be so pleased. But over time it’s probably the album that’s influenced most metal bands ever.’ Maybe so. Certainly David Ellefson of Megadeth wouldn’t disagree: ‘Because it was so progressive, it was complicated. In the early days we all prided ourselves on how fast we played. Then there came a point where we prided ourselves on how complicated we could be. Musical intellectual pride or some bullshit, you know?’ He laughs. ‘If there was just some bass in here this thing would be fuckin’ heavy, you know? Really heavy…’

As Ellefson suggests, the most glaring omission from the sound on…And Justice for All was any evidence of Jason Newsted’s bass; an unforgivable omission given that this was his first album with Metallica, and their first without Cliff Burton. Over the years there have been a variety of reasons given for this, from the accusation that Lars and James simply turned down the sound of Jason’s bass in the mix as another part of his hazing; to the suggestion that technically they simply didn’t leave enough room in there to hear Jason’s bass between James’ staccato rhythm guitar and Lars’ booming bass drum.

‘I was so in the dirt,’ said Newsted, speaking more than ten years later. ‘I was so disappointed when I heard the final mix. I basically blocked it out, like people do with shit. We were firing on all cylinders, and shit was happening. I was just rolling with it and going forward. What was I gonna do, say we gotta go remix it?’ There were, he said, ‘still weird feelings going on…the first time we’d been in the studio for a real Metallica album, and Cliff’s not there’. Working alone with assistant engineer Toby Wright, he had used the same bass set-up as he would for a gig: ‘There was no time taken about you place this microphone here, and this one sounds better than that…should you use a pick, should you use your fingers? Any of the things that I know now.’ Recording three or four songs in a day, ‘basically