...And Justice for All is the fourth studio album by American heavy metal band Metallica, released on August 25, 1988, by Elektra Records.

It was included in The Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop critics' poll of the year's best albums, and was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1989, controversially losing out to Jethro Tull in the Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance Vocal or Instrumental category.

The single "One" backed the band's debut music video, and earned Metallica their first Grammy Award in 1990 (and the first ever in the Best Metal Performance category).

It was successful in the United States, peaking at number six on the Billboard 200, and was certified 8× platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in 2003 for shipping eight million copies in the U.S.

The album was reissued on November 2, 2018, in vinyl, CD, and cassette formats, as well as receiving a deluxe box set treatment with bonus tracks and unreleased video footage.

[10] He had been initially unavailable for the planned start on January 1, 1988, and the band hired Mike Clink, who had caught their attention for producing the debut Guns N' Roses album Appetite for Destruction (1987).

[17] Rasmussen said in 2018: "I'm probably one of the only people in the world, including Jason and Toby Wright, the assistant engineer, who heard the bass tracks on And Justice for All, and they are fucking brilliant.

...And Justice for All is a musically progressive album featuring long and complex songs,[24] fast tempos and few verse-chorus structures.

[25] Metallica decided to broaden its sonic range, writing songs with multiple sections, heavy guitar arpeggios and unusual time signatures.

'"[22] Critic Simon Reynolds noted the riff changes and experimentation with timing on the album's intricately constructed songs: "The tempo shifts, gear changes, lapses, decelerations and abrupt halts".

[23] BBC Music's Eamonn Stack wrote that ...And Justice for All sounds different from the band's previous albums, with longer songs, sparser arrangements, and harsher vocals by Hetfield.

[27] According to journalist Martin Popoff, the album is less melodic than its predecessors because of its frequent tempo changes, unusual song structures and layered guitars.

He named contemporaries Nuclear Assault as the only other band who applied ecological lyrics to thrash metal songs rather than singing about Satan and Egyptian plagues.

"[35] Concerns about the state of the environment ("Blackened"), corruption ("...And Justice for All"), and blacklisting and discrimination ("The Shortest Straw") are emphasized with traditional existential themes.

")[38] while the second line comes from Lord Foul's Bane, a fantasy novel by American writer Stephen R. Donaldson ("These are the pale deaths which men miscall their lives.").

It depicts a cracked statue of a blindfolded Lady Justice, bound by ropes with her breasts exposed and her scales overflowing with dollar bills, with the title in graffiti style.

[53] In a contemporary review for Rolling Stone, Michael Azerrad said that Metallica's compositions are impressive and called the album's music "a marvel of precisely channeled aggression".

[25] Spin magazine's Sharon Liveten called it a "gem of a double record" and found the music both edgy and technically proficient.

[54] Simon Reynolds, writing in Melody Maker, said that "other bands would give their eye teeth" for the songs' riffs and found the album's densely complicated style of metal to be distinct from the monotonous sound of contemporary rock music: "Everything depends on utter punctuality and supreme surgical finesse.

"[23] Borivoj Krgin of Metal Forces said that it was the most ideal album he has heard because of typically exceptional production and musicianship that is more impressive than that of Master of Puppets.

[45] In a less enthusiastic review for The Village Voice, Robert Christgau believed that the band's compositions lack song form and that the album "goes on longer" than Master of Puppets.

[50] In 1988, ...And Justice for All was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance, but controversially lost to Jethro Tull's Crest of a Knave.

[43] AllMusic's Steve Huey noted that Metallica followed the blueprint of the previous two albums, with more sophisticated songs and "apocalyptic" lyrics that envisioned a society in decay.

[9] Colin Larkin, writing in the Encyclopedia of Popular Music (2006), noted that, apart from the praiseworthy "One", the album diminished the band's creativity by concentrating the songs with too many riffs.

Slant Magazine ranked it number 48 on their list of the "100 Greatest Music Videos", saying that Metallica "evoke a revolution of the soul far more devastating than that presented in the original text".

[22][36] Since its release, the album has scanned more than 8 million copies in the US and, according to MTV's Chris Harris, "helped cement [Metallica's] status as a rock and roll force to be reckoned with".

[72] According to Billboard, the accompanying Damaged Justice tour evolved the band into arena headliners, while significant airplay was garnered by "One" and by the group's first music video.

[85] "Dyers Eve" debuted live in 2004, sixteen years after it was recorded, during the Madly in Anger with the World Tour at The Forum in Inglewood, California.

In 2018, the album was remastered and reissued in a limited edition deluxe box set with an expanded track listing and bonus content.

The deluxe edition set includes the original album on vinyl and CD, three LPs with a remixed and remastered version of the concerts performed at the Seattle Coliseum, Seattle, Washington on August 29 and 30, 1989 (originally included in the box set Live Shit: Binge & Purge), eleven CDs of live tracks, demo recordings, B-sides, rough mixes, and radio edits recorded from 1986 to 1989, and four DVDs of unreleased footage of the band.