It features live performances, demos, interviews, rough mixes and sketches of riffs and ideas that became the basis for the songs. The almost US$200 set serves up a package including a 180-gram double LP and CD, three live LPs, a picture disc, eleven CDs and four DVDs featuring unreleased content, an MP3 download card of all the audio, a tour laminate, a set of four patches, a print from the artist Pushead, a lyrics folder and sheets, and a 120-page hardcover book with never-before-seen photos and stories.

All in all, it offers a complete and somewhat overwhelming look into a major part of the band’s history.

For Metallica, the road to becoming one of the world’s biggest musical acts began with …And Justice for All, the band’s fourth album. It can be seen as the peak of the band’s phase-one trajectory as underground metal titans, which included their 1983 debut Kill ‘Em All, 1984’s Ride The Lightning and 1986’s masterful Master of Puppets (arguably the band’s best and one of rock music’s finest moments).

Justice continued the progressive rock minded complexity that Masterintroduced but pushed that element much further, losing some of Master’smelodic edge and focusing on a more sprawling experience.

Every song was a multisuite monstrosity of shape-shifting guitar riffs and rhythms, with track lengths running close to 10 minutes. The themes were getting heavier, with Hetfield’s lyrics addressing political tyranny on the title track and “Eye of the Beholder”, religious fanaticism and familial sorrow on “Dyers Eve”, and most popularly the terrifying idea of being rendered a mute quadriplegic through war on the hit single “One”.

It was a gloriously bloated, indulgent, ambitious and angry beast of a record. The song “One” became the band’s first music video and introduced them to a large MTV-worshipping audience which went far beyond their metal underground fan base. Somehow, it feels like the album could not have come out any other way.

Justice was the first album to be written and recorded after the unexpected death of original bassist Cliff Burton, who died in a bus accident during the Puppets tour.

The oldest of the band members, Burton was the band’s older brother figure as well as the one who introduced non-metal elements into Metallica. His replacement was Jason Newstead, a fan of the band and dedicated metal-head whose enthusiasm and sheer presence seemed to irk the other members — then still very young and traumatized — who essentially treated the bass player as a second-rate citizen until he quit in 2001.

The bass tracks in Justice are all but inaudible, which has been ascribed to a form of hazing mixed with the other band members’ — vocalist-guitarist James Hetfield, drummer Lars Ulrich, and guitarist Kirk Hammett — sudden loss of one of their own.

The remastered Justice does not exactly bring back the bass but it does make it sound less piercing.

While the lack of bass on that album certainly didn’t affect the band’s growing popularity — with Justice selling 2 million records in the first year of its release and eventually 8 million — it’s certainly a pleasant change to hear the songs in a way that some form of low end can actually be heard. Some fans will disagree of course, but this is a case where remastering actually feels like it was more than a promotional copy.

As for that bass, the live versions of the Justice songs here, as well as the rough mixes and demos, show that there was actually bass in the arrangements. But as Hetfield once noted, the reason the bass couldn’t be heard on Justice had more to do with the lines Newstead was playing — the bass player essentially followed almost note-to-note Hetfield’s rhythm riffing, making it hard to identify on the record.

In these live versions, we see a band still hungry but also already established enough to evoke arena-ready declarations. Hetfield was morphing into the crowd-conquering front man he was to be.

Wicked taunting and chest-thumping interactions were his forte, and these recordings find him leading a band that was on fire, and whether they realized it or not, had a massive attack through Newstead’s raw, punchy basslines. Playing with a pick instead of his fingers as Burton did, Newstead’s playing (and backing vocals, a first for Metallica then) was dripping with the kind of metallic wrath that was perfectly suited for that era’s Metallica.

The skeletal forms of the song can be found on a disc filled with Hetfield’s riff demos. Recorded in very raw form, with audible hisses and buzzing, these low-fidelity insights into the band’s songwriting process, presenting sections of riffs that would be fleshed into the songs fans now know.

Metallica has always been open with their writing process. Videos of the process were uploaded to their YouTube channel following their 2016 album Hardwired...To Self-Destruct, this is still a great fly-on-the-wall moment for a legendary record.

Another disc features early demos recorded in November 1987 and finds the songs taking shape and Hetfield singing a lot of nonsense words and “na na’s” as placeholder lyrics. On a CDs worth of rough mixes we can hear the songs becoming even tighter, and is certainly the version of the record with the most audible bass.

These demos show the interesting changes the songs go through — from vocal phrasing to changing solos.

The videos showcase a band that was well on its way to rock star status and readily embracing it while still having a hand on rock ‘n’ roll debauchery. Some of the videos are iconic at this point as well as some looser moments of the band hanging out.

The book contains a lot of photos from the era, including intriguing recording notes and factoids.

This deluxe release does come at a hefty price, as mentioned above, but it truly does contain a wealth of material that doesn’t feel like leftovers. Always disciplined at self-documenting, Metallica has crafted an overwhelming presentation that will take a long time to fully indulge. For those who are fans of the band and of Justice, this is one worth shelling out for.

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Can be bought at metallica.com