METALLICA: And Justice For All Vinyl 2LP

By 1988 Metallica were running on grief and spite, and it shows. .And Justice For All arrived two years after Cliff Burton died on a tour bus in Sweden, and the band responded by making something enormous, punishing, and almost completely devoid of bass guitar, which remains one of the stranger production decisions in metal history.

What it lacks in low end it more than makes up for in ambition. This is thrash metal eating itself alive and coming out the other side as something closer to progressive metal, songs that run eight, nine, ten minutes and don't apologise for it. Blackened, One, The Shortest Straw, these tracks rewrote what heavy music was allowed to do structurally, and the album's cold, mechanical sound ended up influencing a decade of industrial and alternative metal that followed. The 2018 remaster brings some clarity to what was always a deliberately harsh mix.

2018 remaster pressing. Vinyl 2LP. Genre: thrash metal, progressive metal. Origin: USA.

Fans of: Slayer, Megadeth, Testament, Pantera.

Format: Vinyl LP.