"It's great when music leaves your head and inhabits your body, but there are some songs where you need to keep thinking." The story behind Metallica's apocalyptic thrash masterpiece, Blackened

Metallica in Chicago 8/6/89.

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…’