If there was one subject that was like catnip to thrashers in the 1980s, it was man-made environmental destruction. Kreator had Toxic Trace, Testament offered Greenhouse Effect, while Nuclear Assault spoiled ecologically minded fans with climate collapse bangers Critical Mass and Inherited Hell.
Metallica made a late contribution with the ecological doom of Blackened, the opening track on their 1988 album …And Justice for All.
Opening the album with a theme of apocalyptic annihilation, Hetfield imagines Earth’s destruction in the aftermath of a nuclear winter. If the 1984 film Threads was ever turned into a musical, Blackened would be the showstopper: ‘Death of Mother Earth, never a rebirth, evolution’s end, never will it mend, never…’
The song’s genesis falls squarely at the feet of bassist Jason Newsted, who’d joined the band just weeks after the death of Cliff Burton.
As bassist in Flotsam and Jetsam, he co-wrote the music on their debut Doomsday for the Deceiver and was the band’s primary lyricist. After recording his parts for The $5.98 E.P. – Garage Days Re-Revisited, he was keen to contribute ideas for their fourth studio album.
The bassist had a four-track Tascam recorder set up in his Bay Area apartment and kept returning to one particular riff while working on ideas.
“The main riff is mine,” Newsted told Guitar World in 2013. “I wrote it on bass, though. I’ve never told this story before, and it warms me a bit. I’d only been in the band for a very short time. I was still in a little one-bedroom rented apartment. And James would come over to the house, like buddies. He’d come over for dinner. We’d hang out and play guitars on the couch. It was pretty fucking dreamy for me. Metallica was my favourite band.
“I’m fucking around with this riff and then he started playing along,” he continued. “The song started forming right at that time. I’m sitting up in my chair, like, ‘Holy shit, dude. This is something!’ That was the first thing we ever constructed together. And him going, “Dude, that riff’s good enough to open our fucking album,” really gave me a feeling of victory, because I looked up to him greatly, and still do to this day.”
(Image credit: Blackened Recordings)
You can hear the song’s progression – and Newsted’s complex bassline – through a series of demo tapes included in the 30th-anniversary reissue of …And Justice for All. The song would earn Newsted his first of three co-writing credits throughout his 14-year tenure (My Friend of Misery and Where the Wild Things Are would follow).
On the album itself, Blackened opens with the sound of multi-tracked guitars played backwards which sounds like they’re ominously unraveling. When the song starts properly, it begins quickly and continues apace for its duration.
You have to really stay on top of all the the starts and stops and tempo changes.
Lars Ulrich
Blackened is the seventh fastest in Metallica’s extensive back catalogue, and surprisingly, is a fraction slower than the …And Justice For All closer Dyers Eve. The song averages 190 beats per minute and changes tempo a staggering 19 times. This can pose its own challenges for the band’s timekeeper, especially during a physically punishing two-hour set.
“It’s great when music leaves your head and inhabits your body, but there are some Metallica songs where you need to keep thinking,” Ulrich told the BBC. “Like Blackened, for instance, you have to really stay on top of all the starts and stops and tempo changes. ‘Here it comes. Four bars away, I hope I don’t screw this up!’”
Blackened debuted at MTK Stadion in Budapest in September 1988 on the Damaged Justice tour and became a regular fixture in the set list, even when their lengthy Justice songs were later condensed into a medley.
Fast-forward more than three decades, Hetfield looked to this specific track for inspiration during the pandemic. He reimagined Blackened as a surly, apocalyptic cowboy singalong as a way for his bandmates to overcome the challenges of being in quarantine and play music together again, albeit remotely.
“I kind of got a little annoyed and pissed,” Hetfield told Steffan Chirazi for the band’s own So What? fan club magazine. “What would be a great thing to reconnect the band again? Why not take a song and just mess around with it? So I got Blackened… I don’t know, there’s just something that clicked for me, and I just said, ‘Hey, guys, here’s a challenge. I’m going to send you something. You add onto it. You’re musicians.’
“I had an acoustic mic and my regular vocal mic and just threw it down on a couple different tracks,” he adds. “I said, ‘Hey, put whatever you feel you want to on this. Let’s have fun with this, don’t study it, don’t over-listen to it, just feel it.’ And Blackened 2020 is what happened from that, and that was the beginning of the reconnection online with our creative flow.”
Almost four decades later, Blackened remains a fan favourite and an integral part of the band’s identity, inspiring the name of their record label and American whiskey. It has been performed over 550 times since 1988, including the band’s recent summer show at London Stadium. A masterpiece.
